Do external links drain PageRank?
-
Example: A page has 100 links, 90 internal links and 10 external links. The page has a Google internal PR of 1000.
The question is: Is the pagerank that flows to the internal links being calculated taking into account all links on the page (internal + external) or only the 90 internal links? E.g. is the PR that flows to the internal links 1000/100 or 1000/90? Are links to external sites "votes" that do not affect the internal PR flow?
Disclaimer: I understand that the maths behind the PR algo are more complex. This simplified example only serves to explain my question.
-
Agreed.
I believe it is important to have a "natural" link scheme in order to rank well. Sites that only receive but don't give might look unnatural. There must be some kind of "reward" in Google's algorithm for sites that link out to relevant, quality resources.
-
Yes, I agree that it cannot be in Google's interest to "penalize" a site for linking out to high quality, relevant resources. Google's algorithm is based on sites linking to each other so why should they discourage people to do that. So, thumbs up for high quality, relevant, editorial, ext. links; thumbs down for low quality ext. links.
-
Ah, the classic unanswerable question.
Many people have asked - and many people have guessed at the answer. There are numerous ways people have approached this "problem" - some nofollow outbound links, some use javascript to hide the links entirely from bots.
I keep coming back to the advice - what would you do if there were no search engines? Building your site to make sense for people is still the advice that google offers.
Personally, I like linking out to relelvant topical sites from my ecommerce sites. I'm not being stingy with links to helpful places. I do however nofollow all my comments - for obvious reasons.
-
Dear Florakel,
Google clearly mentioned couple of times that PR will be distributed equally to all links.
so to go back to your math, PR will be divided by 100 (1000/100). I encourage to link out to authoritative sites, because it will also tells google to which neighberhood you belong to.
-
According to your example, external links drain page rank.
Every link, whether internal or external gets the same juice to it.
Theoretically
EDIT: Better show my working since it didn't save last time
Whiteboard Friday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose
No Follow advice (but has nice diagrams to help you understand) - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow
Bonus thoughts - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagerank-link-patterns-the-new-flow-of-link-juice
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Website Linking from Syndicated Blog Posts
Does it help, hurt, or do nothing for my website's SEO if I do internal linking from syndicated blog posts (on my blog) to my website pages? For example, a syndicated blog post on winterizing your house has instances of "homeowners insurance" linking to my webpage on homeowners insurance. Proper canonicalization is done as well.
On-Page Optimization | | BFMichael0 -
How many internal links should a (sub-)page maximal have?
What would the effect of having too much be? Does google stop crawling after a number and punish more internal links?
On-Page Optimization | | brainfruit0 -
Link flow for multiple links to same URL
Hi there,
On-Page Optimization | | doctecs
my question is as follows: How does Google handle link flow if two links in a given page point to the same URL? (do they flow link individually or not?) This seems to be a newbie question, but actually it seems that there is little evidence and even also little consensus in the SEO community about this detail. Answers should include source Information about the current state of art at Google is preferable The question is not about anchor text, general best practises for linking, "PageRank is dead" etc. We do know that the "historical" PageRank was implemented (a long time ago) without special handling for multiple links, as e.g. last stated by Matt Cutts in this video: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 On the other hand, many people from the SEO community say that only the first link counts. But so far I could not find any data to back this up, which is quite surprising.0 -
Total Links has doubled in less than one month!? Trust and Authority Drop
Hey Guys, Our website has just recently started to manage our website with SEO in mind and there are a few things that I am concerned about. 1. Domain authority, moztrust, mozrank have been dropping. 2. We had 368k links on 6/27 and on 7/11 we had 563k Is this a result of confusion between our www.websitenamehere.com and websitenamehere.com?
On-Page Optimization | | briggsb0 -
Are Back Links King
We have worked as closely as possible to the guidelines and advice on this forum, if we compare our on page Analsis with other companies in the same field as ours we have a far better site as far as SEO is concerned, our DA authority is higher and most of our page authority is higher but we just cannot seem to get up to their level in the search engines, one site that is in competiton with us do not use Facebook and also they do not use Twitter very much, I looked at some of their backlinks and their top one which was a blog had not been updated since 2011, over the years we have amassed far more what I would call worthless links as this was the done thing then, how can I get on the right track, are there any companies who could assess our site for a reasonable cost to point us in the right direction, we are doing our own blog, Facebook, Twitter, Onlywire?
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
What is the right schema.org link for a web design / developer / mobile agency?
It seems strange that a group of web developers would make up an entire structured language to designate businesses by category and somehow forget to include companies like.... web developers. So I must be missing it, what is correct to use?
On-Page Optimization | | yeagerd0 -
Which pages should use rel="canonical" links?
I have many pages showing up as multiple content. Most of the them belong to product pages for my store, login pages that show up everywhere on the site, etc. I know that I need to use the rel=canonical link in the header but after searching the forum I'm still unsure of what pages need it. Is it the pages that I don't want searched/crawled by Google or the other way around? Thanks! Crystal
On-Page Optimization | | COfashionista0 -
Do footer links apply too many on-page links?
We tend to put a a lot of links in the footers of some of our websites (e.g. www.AlohaWhistler.com). Our CAMPAIGNS report is showing that several pages on such sites have "too many on-page links". We understand the logic that having more than 100 links per page is "too much". Does this also apply to footer links?
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0