Outgoing Links and Website Ranking
Well, my boss at my online marketing & web optimization job told me something really intriguing today, and I felt compelled to research it when I got home.He said that links going from your website to a different website created an effect like energy leaking away from your website and that it had a deleterious effect on browser rankings.
I went to Google Webmaster Tools to see what they had to say about it, but so far the only thing that seemed to relate to what my boss said was this:
•Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
This was at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 under the heading “"Design and content guidelines"”.
I'm going to research further to see if I can find a deeper explanation. But first, I'm going to install Lynx, which Google recommended as a good test viewer for website design.
These problematic questions have a way of presenting answers in bits and pieces, and I'm confident that I'll eventually put it all together. If you have an experience with link energy drain, I'd love to read about it.
Okay, so I just struck a goldmine at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank, which had an eye-catching graph and a deep statement. It said, "The value of incoming links is colloquially referred to as 'Google juice' or 'link juice'." This is very close to what Mark said to me today. He mentioned something about losing your juice through the link. You can see the graph at: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/PageRank-hi-res.png. The algorithm for the proportion of ranking juice:links is given in my next blog.
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