Bootleg, the reason they are removed is so that all other pages PR can be calculated. Then they are added in later at a time where they can still receive the proper PR but not pass any anywhere else. This is what he meant about them not diluting the PR being passed to other pages. That is unless I miss my guess. It has happened before
William, I think the question is does the PR passed to the dangling link pages dilute the amount of PR passed to other pages linked to from the same page. If a page has 10 links on it and 2 of them are dangling is the passed PR equal to PR*.85/10, with the dangling links consuming some of the PR, or PR*.85/8, with the PR received by the dangling links not diluting the PR passed to the non-dangling link pages? Help folks, is this what we are talking about?
Being that the dangling links would not be present for the calculations on all others, I would say definately not. They would not decrease the value to the other links.
Thanks William - so you're saying that you think Google removes the dangling links from the equation, runs it's caculations through however many iterations it takes to get their final page rankings, then returns the dangling links and calculates the PR for those pages separate from the rest of the formula without effecting the PR assigned to any other pages. That would seem consistant with Phil's article. It would result in the linking pages sending more PR than they would without dangling links, and the average PR of the entire Google universe not being exactly 1, but the variation would be insignificant. Maybe I'm denser than the average SEO, but I still see an alternate possibility of Google returning the dangling links to the equation for one final iteration of the calculations, resulting in the dangling link pages consuming a portion of the PR available from the linking page and no page would get to transfer extra PR by virtue of having dangling links. I guess it really only matters if you have a site with lots of dangling links...
I was asked to contribute to this thread as it is about "dangling links", but I soon found that it is about whether or not OBLs leak PageRank (I've only read the first few posts so far). So... That's rather abusive and I take personal exception to it, so allow me to correct you. I say that linking out of a site decreases the PageRank within the site, and that linking into a site increases the PageRank within the site. Am I one of the "pretend SEOs that either don't know what they are talking about or are trying to scam you into using their services"? In case you don't know me, my site is www.webworkshop.net, and I am a well-known SEO. In fact I have been described a number of times (rightly or wrongly) as being one of the top SEOs. Also, I am sometimes interviewed by various online and offline publications on the subject, including the Wall Street Journal - that wouldn't happen if I weren't seen as a genuine SEO at least. Who are you, ThinkBling? Seo isn't about what makes sense to us. It's *only* about what makes sense to the search engines - in this case, Google. Also, your idea that, if it were true, everything would have a pagerank of zero, is flawed. I'll explain. If a page has links going from it, then they *must* link to other pages. Therefore, the other pages have inbound links, and the links pass PageRank value to those other pages. So "everything" does not end up with zero PageRank. Owlcroft quoted extracts from my PageRank paper as though they were merely my opinions, and then asked for proof. Unfortunately, he didn't quote the proof that is clearly contained in the article. The extracts that he quotes are part of the whole article, which is there to explain the proof. The proof is this:- PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn)) and it was published by Google. I'm not going to explain it here. I'll just say that it is Google's own proof that linking out of a site decreases the PageRank within the site. Those "crazy" ideas came from Google, Owlcroft. Everyone is free to agree or disagree with Google, of course, but, in this case, I'm happy to take their word for it. In the same post you said, "put it in numbers for me", Owlcroft. The paper you quoted from did put it in numbers for you, and I've repeated the basis of the numbers above. You are correct. Pages do not leak PageRank. When a page links out of a site, the site leaks PageRank. Precisely which pages lose PageRank depends on the linkages within the site, but the amount of PageRank within the site is reduced, and one or more of the site's pages suffers a reduction in PageRank, after a link out of the site is placed on a page. The proof beyond any reasonable doubt that you requested is in the equation above. I've now read the rest of the thread, which got back to the original question about links to pages that are disallowed by the robots.txt file. My reply to the original question is - I haven't a clue. Without strict testing, we cannot know what Google does in those circumstances - all we can do is guess. They did say that most of their dangling links are dangling because they haven't yet spidered the pages that are linked to. So it seems reasonable to assume that, since they haven't spidered the disallowed pages, links to them would be treated as dangling, which would mean that they are dropped from the PageRank calculations within the first few iterations, and put back again for the last few iterations. One thing that we can't be certain of is whether or not they drop all the effects of dangling links. E.g. they may still keep them in the number of OBLs from a page, which would mean that they still reduce the value of each of the other OBLs on the page. If it is of real concern, perhaps the best thing to do would be to hide the links to disallowed pages. Better still, don't get too hung up on PageRank. The power of targeted link text far outweighs it - they are in different leagues.