How to prevent PR drain?

To channel more PR into my internal pages & linking partners. I'm think about preventing my affiliate links from passing on PR, what's the best way of going about this?

I've know javascript links tend to be the most common, but can google now index them and will there be compatibility issuses?

I've noticed other sites have their affiliate links point towards an 'exit' page which then uses a meta redirect to the advertised site. Could internal links on these 'exit' pages redirect PR?

More recently I've noticed some kind of php trickery on links can this be done on ASP?

Thanks in advance

 

Another member has this site in the signature:
http://seo-toys.com/link-hide-seo-toy/via-toy.shtml

I haven't tried it myself yet, but it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.

Geir

 

Yes, (thank you, Geir), I'd reckon it is.

It ("Via" ) is a very simple php script that you place in some convenient directory, then block in your robots.txt file.

There is fuller explanation and documentation at the site.

 

Is it accurate that a slight page rank is lost for outgoing links?

It does seem true that only so much PR can be given from a page to other pages. But does the page with the links going out actually loose PR of its own?

Maybe that answers my question.

Thanks

 

I use clicktracker on some of my sites.

http://www.focalmedia.net/clicktracker.html

 

You can also use the free affiliate link cloaker and disallow the html pages it produces with robots.txt.

 

I prefer JavaScript links for all outbound links. There were rumours that Google was able to parse JavaScript but it is technically very risky (for Google).

 

Read this online paper and draw your own conclusions.

 

thanks everyone,

I don't use PHP so I guess the javascript options are my best, I'm giving the 'affiliate link cloaker' a try.

I noticed it produces some kind of exit page with a javascript unicode redirect, any disadvantages over a meta refresh?

I'm sticking these files in an 'exit' directory is this the correct robots.txt instructions?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /exit/

thanks again

 

Yes, the robots.txt snippet looks correct. The Javascript is actually not a redirect. It frames the target site with an empty frameset. It does not work for visitors who have Javascript turned off BTW. You can always add a <noscript> section if you like.

 

JavaScript is not your best bet.

The "Via" toy mentioned above is quite self-contained: you put it in a handy directory of your choice, you put one line in your robots.txt file, and you write any normal HTML links you want to block just a little differently, pointing to the toy. It's all documented and easy (and free).

There are other ways, too (CSS, for one), but this is a simple, bite-sized little toy.

 

Page Rank Drain or Leakage is a myth. If such thing occurred there would never be high pageranking sites.

 

Thank you ThinkBling, I was just going say the samething, well not exactly, but it would have been very similar

 

Prehaps 'drain' is bad word,

'Channelling' is what I'm aiming for.

But before this turns into a moral debate, let me say that I'm no fan of SEO I wish google or another search engine simply just finds good content (and my site with it). But it doesn't so tough, SEO I must and every little helps.

 

Sigh. As the Count famously said, "One more once."

When you feel prepared to dispute its conclusions with a matching depth of data and mathematical analysis of that data, please, by all means, do so here. I have yet to have that oft-repeated challenge answered, which is suggestive.

I am not an expert: like Will Rogers, I only know what I read in the papers. If you want to challenge what's in online SEO research papers, fine, I'll read your paper too.

I'm waiting for the latest edition . . . .

 

Its not a myth, it is mathematics.

If you have a pizza and 3 friends and you all must eat, each of you gets 25% of the pizza. If you have a pizza and 7 friends and all must each, each of you gets 12.5% of the pizza. Adding friends = less food for everyone.

Links and PageRank are the same way. Every link on a page gets a share of the page's PageRank. Of the links on the page some are links to other pages of yours, others are links to someone else's pages. If you add more links to someone else's pages your pages get less PR. If you add more links to your pages, the other person's pages get less PR. If you remove all links to someone else's pages your pages share all the PR.

So less outgoing links = more PageRank flowing through your site.

Not a myth, mathematics.

 

Here's a well formed post from compar concerning linking truths.

Here's another with actual mathmatical calculations to a PageRank calculation.

Also read the following post that I will make in regards to aspen's post as I break it down in simpler terms.

 

Sometimes we look so hard at the details, we lose sight of the big picture.

PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of a page. PageRank is not to be confused with SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). What makes something more important? There are numerous things. What is a good indicator? “Reference” is. A person on the mind of millions is more important than a person on the mind of hundreds. A good example is the president. He is on many more people's minds than my bling self.

Now if the president talks of a specific country, does he lose importance or pass/leak his reference off to somebody else? Never. Having him reference something else might actually make his reference increase.

However, if he references 2 things, each individual topic might not get the same focus as when he references just 1. Is each topic's focus halved? No, but it is lessened.

To compare, lets take site A with 1 link versus and site B with 100 unique links (duplicate links probably don't carry additional weight). The link from site A should have more emphasis than any 1 link from site B. However if the above type of algorithm holds, the total weight of all links from B would be greater that of A.

I did not choose to find mathematical evidence on the web as every article must be taken with a grain of salt as it is impossible to do any of these tests in a closed environment. All that one can do when you pose a page-rank question is to think about the larger algorithm and its intentions. Page-rank leakage just doesn’t make sense.

 

A page does not directly lose PR for linking out. Other pages on the same site just get less.

If you don't think its good search engine design to implement this type of algorithm you are more than welcome to your opinion. However it seems to me that you haven't thought about the larger algorithm.

Have you read Sergey and Larry's thesis or that PageRank explained paper? Do you understand the mathematics of it?

The average PR of all pages on the Internet must = 1. When Google is calculating PageRank every iteration of the equation MUST lower the average PR of the Internet, or they will never reach 1.

So, in order for PageRank to decrease with every iteration of the algorithm, two things must happen.

1. Links have to divide the PageRank of a page equally. So, to use your analogy, if the president talks about two topics each would have to be halved in focus. They have to be. This is so PageRank doesn't increase.

2. There has to be a dampening factor, or PageRank won't decrease.

Now, here is reasoning for #1.

If the PageRank on page X given to outside link A does not exactly equal the PageRank removed from internal link B then if X links to A and A links back to X (or A links to a middleman which then links back to X). Then PageRank will increase in an infinite loop. For each iteration of the algorithm global PageRank will increase. They will never reach the normalized sum of 1. They will be caught it what is basically a feedback loop, like when you put a microphone next to a speaker.

Its mathematics. The equation is unbalanced. The PageRank passed on cannot exceed the PageRank possessed.

If you want to believe that outgoing links do not detract from the PageRank that is passed to internal links, I can't stop you. I've dealt with such believers for years and for some people no matter how much evidence you show them they just can't change.

The problem with such people, in general, is that they do not understand why search engines exist. They think it is unfair, undemocratic, or unethical to hide links or to refuse to link you to someone. They think that implementing this algorithm is unfair to webmasters and does not promote a utopian Internet.

In reality search engines do not exist for webmasters, they exist for consumers, they exist to provide relevant results, not to provide a fair and balanced battleground for webmasters. They do not care if their ranking algorithm is fair, only if it is relevant.

So, don't worry about whether an algorithm is fair to webmasters, worry about whether it produces relevant results.

In truth, outgoing links do not hurt that much. If the link is on a subpage and is outnumbers by internal links the PR loss is very very small. However, if you put a plethora of outgoing links on your homepage, or if every page of your site has some, then you can use significant PageRank from them. If the place you're linking to links back to you though you'll likely get most of it back.

Also, by adding outgoing links, someone might find your site more useful, and that might inspire them to link to you, so you gain in that way.

So you can argue whether it is ethical or even needed to engage in so-called "PageRank Hoarding" but, do not argue against the mathematical certainty that all links on a page must share the total PageRank of the page and that the total weight of the links on a page cannot exceed it's total PageRank.

 

I think there is one last step that is being missed in this discussion. It is true that if you double the number of OBL from a page each target page including the internal pages will only receive half the PR they previously did. See my article and chart which is published in the SitePro News today.

The point that is being missed is that this means that each internal page has that much less to pass back to the home page. So excessive outlinking from a page does diminish the pages PR, all other things being equal.

However the people who are paranoid about this are not usually talking about doubling the number of outbound links. They are obsessing about even one or two OBLs.

This type of paranoia is ridiculous for two reasons.

1. PR has almost nothing to do with SERP placement today.

2. There is a growing body of evidence, that sites with a substantial number of outbound links, are getting higher SERP placement.

So forgetting that hiding reciprocal links is selfish, and bordering on dishonest, it may in fact be working against the page. I think this is what is known as ironic justice, and I invite all my competitors to continue to hide all their outbound links. Just don't come crying when your page doesn't show up in the SERPs.