IdleTymes Blog

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 a guy called chrishirst refused to admit he was wrong, must have been hard to admit your wrong to a seemingly newbi. His total belief 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.

You can see for yourself here, you can see why I didn’t want to quit. The argument was insane, even though I (nixies@yahoo.co) had defeated every one of his points 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 get his head around how if the equation was based on incoming links how could outgoing links could reduce the amount of pagerank a page has, even though one pages incoming link is another outgoing link.

We repeated the same points for ages, I tried to explain that the formula was done from scratch so all that it needed was for the calculated value to be less than it was before to have effectively been ‘drained’ but to no avail.

NO I understand that you need to agree on these points on how the Page Rank calculation works:

• 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.
• 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.

Basically the way I see it is that the calculated. Bear in mind this is highly simplified (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 the pagerank is given as a vote which is devided between all the pages that it links point to. So a new page rank is calulated. This bit everyone agrees on, pagerank is made up of vote from your inbound links.

However this is where people get lost, the calculation is then repeated starting with the new values, so the pervious pagerank that has been gain on pervious calulation can be passed on. 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.

So that is the main point if you link out of your own website, to a website that does not link back to you. The pagerank is not coming back to your site so you are going to drain/leak/lose pagerank.

Does page rank have any effect on how well your site is ranked? Well that is a completely different question.

To end with some killer sites I found whilst surfing. Another plug for a friend of mine, he makes really quality oak doors. Here is a interesting one. I’ve started to write about something called Home information packs! HIPS

I must sleep.