I managed to get caught up in a thread on a forum about if outgoing links reduce the amount of Page Rank on your site. The discussion went on for ages going around in circles the main advocate was chrishirst, who refused to backdown and also refused to back up his own points. He totally believed that:

NO NO NO NO NO! The calculation is for incoming links to page A. the outgoing links on page A are not factored into the calculations so they cannot have even the slightest effect on the value.

If you read the thread here, you can see what I'm talking about. The conversation is bizarre, even though I had all cited all my evidence he still refused to admit that their may be a outside chance he hadn't understood the equation.

The debate was completely ground to a halt because; He could not get his head around how if the equation was based on incoming links how the outgoing links could reduce the amount of Page Rank you have.

We beat around the bush for a long time, I tried to exaplin the way the equation worked.

NO I understand that you need to agree on these points on how google's page rank calulation works:

• The green bar shown on the toolbar is just a label given to a page depending on the group that the actual page rank falls into.
• The calculation is done for each individual page not site.
• Each time the calculation is done it is done from scratch; no prior Page rank is worked in the equation.
• The equation is repeated multiple times.

This is how I like to think of the calulation. Bear in mind this is a simplification (and if you want to go into specific details it is wrong).

Each page indexed by google is given a value of one; part of this value is given as a vote which is divided between all of the pages that it links to. So a new value is calulated. Now this is the part that most people understand, Pagerank is calulated from incoming links.

This is where it gets tricky, the equation is repeated a least 40 times, so the pervious pagerank that has been gain on pervious calulation can be passed on. This process is repeated multiple times. So since you divide your vote between the pages that you link to, if you link to pages that are voting for you then in the next calculation (vote) you are going to get more back than if you have linked elsewhere.

And this is the main point if you link out of your site, to a website that does not link back to you. The page rank is not coming back to your site so you are going to drain/lose/leak PR.

Does page rank have any effect on how well your site is ranked? That is a much more complicated question.

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And this is me signing off!!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 8:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized, SEO, Site Design. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.