Does outgoing links drain Page Rank? Recently I have been involved in a thread on the webmasters talk forum wether outgoing links reduce a websites Page Rank. The discussion went on for ages continuously covering the same points mainly because chrishirst refused to back up his point with any real evidence. His total belief that:

the PR equation only inbound links are used

You can read the thread here, you will see how the discussion went. The conversation is bizarre, even though I (nixies) had all the proof and experts backing me up he still couldn't bring himself to admit the possiblity their may be the smallest outside chance that he could possible, maybe, be wrong.

The discussion was stuck on this point; He could not make sense of how the equation only looked at incoming links how the outgoing links could reduce the amount of Page Rank you have.

We repeated the same points for ages, I tried to exaplin the way the equation worked.

There are a few things that need to be understood when figuring out how google calulates page rank:

• 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.

Basically the way I see it is that the calculated. Bear in mind this is highly simplified (also if you look at the actual equation the specifics are wrong, it designed to make it easier to understand like went you find out that everythign you learnt in GCSE physic was all a lie when you do A Level Physic).

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 that gives you a new value. Usually everyone is okay with this bit, pagerank is made up of vote from your inbound links.

This is where it gets slighty more complicated, the calculation is then repeated starting with the new values, so that the pages that have gained from the pervious calculation have more to vote. This process is repeated multiple times. So because your vote is devided between the pages that you have links to, if you give all your vote to pages that link back to you on the next vote (calulation) 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 vote is not going to come back to you so you are going to lose/drain/leak page rank.

What effect page rank has on how well your site is ranked? Well that is a completely different question.

Here is some other groovy stuff I stumbled across. A friend of mine, Kate has been rebuilding court house clinics website. have a looks see what you think.

That enought from me, goodbye.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.