Don’t Be a Link Nazi
I may be the only SEO that doesn’t buy into the myth that your PageRank (PR) gets passed out by linking to other websites. It’s a stupid myth that I’ve never believed. Seriously, do you really think your PageRank gets distributed when you link to another website? Sillyness!
If you link to other people your PageRank does not get passed out, in other words the PR on your site is not lowered if you link to other people. There’s a difference to passing authority and passing PR. Passing authority simply means that your site, which we hope has some authority is passing on some love to the site you’re linking to. You’re giving the site a vote of confidence, which turns into PR for them, but it’s not at the expense of your own PageRank.
I think this where the common misconception lies (from the original Google research pape)…
The PageRank given to Page A by a Page B pointing to it is decreased
with each link to anywhere that exists on Page B. That means a page’s
PageRank is essentially a measure of its vote; it can split that vote
between one link or two links or many more, but its overall voting
power will always be the same.
It doesn’t say that the PR of site B is lowered which each link it gives out. It basically says the more sites that site B links to the less PageRank each of those sites gets.
So stop being a link nazi and spread the link love. If anything this will only help you, not hurt you. Some people are going so far as to putting no follow tags on their own inbound links, this is ridiculous.
Feel free to agree or disagree.
Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of
I think that your PR may reduced if you link out. I have seen reciprocal link pages on websites with lower PR because they have 100 outbound links, but there could be other factors that are causing this. For this main reason a lot of people don’t link out, but I like linking out. If you are linking to a website that your visitors will find useful, then it is worth linking to that site.
This is a highly debatable topic and tons of people are in love with PR, but I do not even look at PR anymore. There are sites with low PR that rank higher then high PR sites.
I’ve heard the myth before, but never really took much stock in it, or looked at the origins. But with what Google says, if you read it properly, you’re 100% right. I think more people need to think this way, so they aren’t so afraid of linking.
I agree with Neil. I think I have the highest ranking site in Google that doesn’t appear in anyone elses blogroll! I just link out whenever I feel like it. If someone deserves praise I give it. If I don’t trust them, I nofollow the link. If they don’t like what I write, fine. Life is too short to be worrying about this too much!
I agree with you. I think it’s a myth. I have hundreds of links out from my blog and the PR hasn’t gone down at all.
Oh my! I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being a link nazi!
I love surfing the blogs out there, and everytime I find one that I want to go back and read again I always forget where they are and can’t find them again…
I solved that problem though… the way I figure it, if I like the blog enough to go back and read it again, than people who like my blog, prob’ly well want to read it too, so I write a post about the blog, which contains a link to it, and than I add it to my blogroll… todat my blog rool has over 100 links in it, it’s by far the biggest blog roll I’ve ever seen on a blog, but at least now I don’t lose my way back to blog I like to read.
well, an unexpected side effect of doing this is that a few days after adding my long blog roll I checked mt Technorati rank, and was shocked to learn that I had gone from being in the millions up to being 200,000, that was quite switch…
well I come to find out, that several of the blogs I had added to my blogroll, had in turn added me to theirs, I was not expecting that, but that’s what did it… when I added them to mine, it raised their rank, and they did me the same favor… WOW! You see at the time I started doing this, I didn’t know about pingbacks, I had never heard of them before, so I didn’t know that everytime I talked about a blog I liked, my blog sent them a copy of my article, so each time I sad something nice about them, they knew I had said it, only I didn’t know that was happening, so I didn’t know that the blogs I was talking about knew about my blog… well long story short, I found a great way to do link exchange and I wasn’t even trying!
~~EK
Lower PR than what? Please Neil, tell me you are not insinuating that a page’s own PR can be lowered by the amount of outbound links on it. OMFG. (unless you’re ultimately referring to later iterations of PR through the entire site causing any given page’s PR to be reduced because the site now has many pages with many [new] outbound links)
And Cameron, you’re wrong… sort of.
Let’s say you publish a page with no outbound links but which has 10 internal links.
Then, you decide to go back and add some “resources” so you edit and republish it, and it now has 10 internal links and 10 outbound links. Publishing the page with those 10 outbound links certainly doesn’t automatically reduce its PageRank, but upon following iterations of PageRank that does mean the PageRank it itself passes through its internal links will be diluted. This could have a noticeable effect on other pages if that particular page happens to be some page that generated a lot of inbound links and is perhaps the highest PR page on the site.
Although if you believe that internally and externally passed pagerank values work independently of one another than the above would not hold true. Unless of course you’re Neil who apparently has seen a page’s own PR reduced because it had 100s of outbound links. In that case, since the page itself had reduced PR it would of course not matter now whether internal and outbound links passed pagerank independently since your internal links on that page would now be subject to a distribution of that self-inflicted lower PR.
i linked this blog entry in my making a blog guide ^^ — have a nice week