How to prevent PR drain?

Absolutely. But when dealing with people who don't believe it I find its better to introduce them to the concept one step at a time.

Whether or not search engines count outgoing links, or if they even should, is a whole nother discussion. If you find a site with many outgoing links ranked well it is a coincidence. The outgoing links and the ranking are not related.

There isn't a shred. People have been saying for years that outgoing links help and they don't. It is a mathematical certainty. As certain as 2+2=4. This type of speculation is just a result of people making uneducated observations in an uncontrolled environment.

Not only that but it makes no sense. If all one had to do was link to a popular authority site everyone would do it and the ranking would be meaningless. It would basically allow people to vote for themselves.

Plus it doesn't increase relevance. Search engines are not in business for webmasters, they are in business for users. Search engines want relevant results. The most relevant result is an authority site, not a hub site. If you think of it logically you would see this.

A search engine wants to provide access to information. If there is a hub site and an authority site which one should the search engine show to the user? Do you really think the hub site should rank better because it links to the authority site? If the authority site is so good why not rank it better? Why tell the user "We know where to find the information you need, but check out this site instead, where you can find a link to the information."?

SERPs are hub sites. A SERP provides links to relevant pages. A hub site provides links to relevant pages. They fulfill the same purpose. Except the search engine has done more work analyzing and ranking the linked to pages, and undoubtedly has more pages to offer.

The only search engine that uses outgoing links is Teoma, and they only use them to create a seperate result set off to the side. This type of implementation is the only one I can see any search engine using as it is the only one that makes sense.

Incoming links are a measure of usefulness as judged by other webmasters or just average joes with a geocities site. If outgoing links make a site more useful, as in the case of DMOZ, it will have incoming links that reflect that.

So why would Google, or any search engine, bother guessing on if outgoing links made a site more useful or not when it can just poll the globe on a site's usefulness?

Sometimes javascript menus make sites more useful, should Google give bonuses for those? Of course not, if they make a site more useful it will be reflected in the incoming links.

The more useful a site is, the more incoming links it has. So by measuring incoming links you're in effect measuring the usefulness of a site's outgoing links (along with everything else).

You'll be hard pressed to find any well known search engine professional who would stand behind the claim of outgoing links helping. Danny Sullivan has called the idea absurd in one of his newsletters. Dan Theis feels the same way. (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000289.html#comments)

If all of that isn't enough for you, there is the raw proof.

http://www.searchenginelabs.com/

The last experiment on the page. 3 trials, the pages with outgoing links do not rank better than those without them.

 

Can you sum up what your point in a shorter post? Your point is being lost. You might be making things much more complex then they should be.

 

It's perfectly clear to me what he means, and makes sense too.

 

Aspen,
You don't seem to be very upto date. Maybe all that stuff that you have known all these years has changed. There is such a thing as being stuck in the past. Learning is a daily ongoing endeavor. Whenever I hear somebody say, as you did two or three posts ago, that you have known it all for years, I get nervous.

There has been a lot of evidence coming out of the recent SEO Conference in London England that one of the Google representatives at the conference confirmed that OBLs were being used in SERP placement determination.

I don't have a link to this information off hand, but maybe someone else does. Or I'll find it, later in the day, and post it for you.

 

Let's take a step back. Why would out bound links ever hurt? How does hurting a site by providing out bound links give a better indication?

I'm not asking for a re-iteration of the formula everybody thinks is Google's. I'm asking a broader question.

 

I believe this to be true, and think it makes perfect sense.

An OBL to a "authority" site is most likely very useful to your site's visitor. Why wouldn't Google (or the other SE's for that matter) give a page some more importance in the serps if it links to useful info?

Even if it's not true as of today, like the whole "themed" linking debate, I think it will be in the future.

Regardless, an OBL to a site you visitor would consider useful is a good idea. Put on your PR blinders and build a site/page that you visitor will find usefull.

 

It won't unless you're building a linkfarm and get penalized.

It will only if you are PR-PaRanoid and OBLs do dilute your precious PR.

 

You do realize you just contradicted yourself in the same post right?

It won't...
It will...

I'm sure it was just do to hurrying. Are you saying that OBL's reduce you pagerank and that doesn't hurt?

 

It is you who is incorrect. There is no direct evidence to support this. There is plenty of evidence to refute it, and no one can come up with a plausible explanation of why this would be done in the first place. Your best evidence is some rumors at a conference. I can show you a controlled experiment where outgoing links are shown to have no effect on a page's ranking.

Reread my longer post above. Then read what I'm about to write.

How does Google know if outgoing links add to the usefulness of a page? By comparing the topics of the two pages in question? Being on topic doesn't make something useful. Useful is subjective by nature. So how in the world does a search engine measure something that is subjective?

Can you tell if a page is useful by analyzing its content? Absolutely not. A computer cannot tell if a page is useful by analyzing content, it can only tell if a page covers a certain topic. Usefulness is subjective.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page had to answer these questions. They came up with the idea that you could measure a site's usefulness by measuring it's incoming links. They theorized that the more useful a site is, the greater chance someone will link to it, so incoming links could be a measure of usefulness.

If outgoing links add to the usefulness of a page then that increase in usefulness should be reflected in their incoming links. As such measuring incoming links is all you need to do.

If Google, or any other search engine, used outgoing links directly as a measure of usefulness then sites where the outgoing links did not increase usefulness, such as sites that sell text links in the footer, would recieve bonuses they did not deserve. Search engine relevance would be hurt, and it'd be a big step back.

People have been saying for years that Google either uses outgoing links or they will. It is a persistent rumor. Also for years I have been saying the same things I have been saying now. No one has ever offered any proof that shows me to be incorrect. The pages I have with 0 external outgoing links continue to rank well. The controlled experiments people run continue to show that outgoing links do not help.

Until one of those things changes I am going to believe, recommend, and advise that outgoing links do not help you in search engines.

I don't tell people they shouldn't link out, I don't tell people outgoing links will hurt them. What I tell them is that outgoing links do not help, and that making them will sacrifice some of the PR you could be sending elsewhere. However that PR in the typical situation is small and usually not worth worrying about, but in extreme circumstances outgoing links can have a substantial negative effect on your rankings.

 

This is not a PageRank issue. PageRank is based entirely off of the PageRank of incoming links. It is a general importance indicator.

However, this is a big SERPs issue. If 5 sites all rank equally for a search term or phrase but only one of them has a link to the other 4 then it is easy to see that this site is a better repository for information.

 

You admit PageRank measures general importance. But does general importance not encompass usefulness?

If the site is a better repository why does it not have more incoming links than the others? Obviously the world as a whole doesn't think its any better, or it would have more incoming links. So why would Google second guess the opinion of the Internet community?

 

No. If you are looking for a way to use PHP to start your own Amazon.com commision earning store, my site is extremely useful. If you are looking for a way to cure cancer, my site is not usefully at all. PageRank is a general indicator and not the ultimate one.

Go to Amazon.com, it will forward you to a sub-page. This sub-page has a page-rank of zero. However this page is extremely usefull if you want to buy something from them.

Links are just indicators and are not a fool-proof way of finding the best results. Try searching for a specific coupon on Google. You will get a bunch of krap.

If a search engine only uses one indicator (IBLs) to search, then the results can be more easily skewed. If you are using 2 indicators (OBLs and IBLs) the results can be better. For example the US treasury does not raise rates based solely on the number of new homes sold per month.

Now if the weight of my IBLs is calculated to be 1,000,000 and yours is 1,200,000 but I have reference to the top 10 sites of the search and yours doesn't, then my page would probably be more targetted to the search.


On a side note, when it comes right down to it, none here really are looking for a high pagerank or top-ten search results placement. We are just looking for targeted traffic.

 

Incoming links are a measure of usefulness, they do not tell you the topic of content.

Maybe your site might be better, but why would Google both to guess when it can just poll the Internet community? Look at backlinks, look at anchor text. Looks like more people find site A a good reference than site B. Site A is probably better, who knows, maybe site B links to site A and most of the visitors to site B end up at A anyways. So, how can B be more useful than A because it links to A?

In anycase I have no wish to argue with you about how a utopian search engine should be run. I only wish to discuss how search engines are run, and I've not seen any empircal evidence to support your points yet.

 

Right. But PR-PaRanoia is ridiculous. How many times do we have to tell these paranoid manics that PR is almost meaningless.

If you look at my chart you will see that the range of values for any given PR ranking is large. So the chance that a few backlinks -- and that is all we are talking about in these debates. Someone wants to hide their affiliate links. How many affiliate links can you have off on one page?

So the chance that a few backlink would actually drop you a whole PR number is very small. And if it did so what?

 

The simple reality is that no one outside Google knows for certain how SERPs are calculated. Period, the end.

To say that this or that does or does not "make sense" is to assume that what makes sense to you or to me or to him or to her must necessarily make sense to Google, and vice versa; that is an assumption so fraught with unrealities as to be risable.

"Experiments" are always a good idea, but I wonder how many of the experimenters could calculate a Standard Deviation if their lives depended on it. For even a sniff of meaningfulness, experiments require a substantial (and controlled) sampling. I don't see that in those I've heard tell of.

Google is a seriously imperfect institution. Take some topic you know well and Google it and ask yourself whether, if a good friend asked you to provide a list of 10 or 20 web sites on the topic, Google's top 10 or 20 are the ones you'd give. Google thrives only because it fits Churchill's remark about democracy as a system of government: the worst possible except for all the others that have been tried.

Considering the overhead of getting into the game on a serious footing, Google is probably safe for a while, as its two chiefest competitors are excellent shots, if one's own foot is a favored target.

 

I didn't contradict myself. The answers were just tailor made for the reader's level of interest on PR rank.

Spelled out:

Outbound links won't hurt IMO because I don't care the least about PR, I link to whoever I want as long as I think it is likely to increase turnover and or profits or benefits the general usefullness/customer experience.

It will hurt however if you are one of those PR freaks who can't sleep because they are so worried about the current dance and that it might drop, but only if indeed G's secret algo DOES dilute PR thus dropping your PR thus affecting you personally or professionally because you will be sad about the loss of PR.

So choose your answer, both are true.

 

How so? The anchor text does as well as the words surrounding it in the sentence and on the rest of the page.

 

Thanks for the tool link! My site is a good candidate for this since I provide a lot of outbound links to outside resources; gov't pages, etc.

 

Prevent Sinus Drainage in the Back of the Throat
Prevent Sinus Drainage in the Back of the Throat
tie on neck image by timur1970 from Fotolia.com

Sinus drainage is a result of a sinus infection or perhaps the aftermath of a cold. Sinus drainage can make breathing, speaking and even drinking difficult. If you've already gone to the doctor and gotten meds to treat your sinus infection, you probably have figured out that sinus drainage doesn't always disappear right away. While it will take some work, there are things you can do to prevent the accumulation of excess drainage.

 

hilarious robot post - epic fail on identifying the thread topic whatever you are paying for this crap, sonny, ask for your money back!


btw, if you are using wordpress, use the linkcloaker plugin from free wordpress plugins - it changes your outbound links on the fly into encrypted local links to stop PR drain and commission poaching.