Does Outlinking Kill Your PageRank?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Rand Fishkin is at it again. He wrote a great blog post on the value of linking out versus linking in. One of the reasons that many search engine marketers refuse to link out on their web properties is because they are afraid that they’ll pass valuable link juice to their competitors that could go to their internal pages instead. Here’s what Rand has to say about that:

As for costing PageRank – yes, it’s true. Technically, the original PR formula (described in great detail here by my grandfather, Si) dictates that any link equity spent on external pages is lost opportunity that could have been spent on internal pages. HOWEVER, I (and many other notable SEO experts) have seen very compelling evidence to suggest that not only does linking out NOT harm a site’s rankings, it appears to carry some positive correlations with ranking, trust, etc. on both a page and domain-wide level.

And here’s my response:

Total bunk!

Search Engine Optimization has been linking out to our competition since Day 1. We’re at a PR5 while some of my competitors who have been at this for longer than I have are still hovering around a PR3 (I purposefully am not linking to those competitors to save them some embarrassment). How is it that a newer site with fewer pages can have a higher PageRank by linking out than older sites with more pages that don’t link out? I think there are several reasons why:

1. PageRank Distribution – Most reputable SEOs agree that PageRank is evenly distributed across between all pages that share a link from the one linking out. That holds true whether the links are internal or external. If you have a site with 1,000 pages and your PR7 page links to everyone one them, you are effectively diminishing the juice that all of your pages receive because of the wide distribution of your PR. On the other hand, a PR5 page that links to only 100 pages, all of them external, actually passes more link juice to each of those pages.
2. The Law of Diminishing Returns – It really doesn’t matter what your page’s PageRank is when it comes to linking. The more linking you do and the more pages that you build on your site to be linked to the more you are demeaning the value of each link. When you have a five-year-old blog that’s been posted to every day for those five years, you have a website with 1,226 pages on it. If each page distributes a sidebar link to each of the other pages on the site then there really is not that much difference between a PR8 site that passes link juice and a PR7 site that passes link juice. We’re talking about minuscule amounts of link juice here.
3. The Law of Reciprocity – Here’s Rand Fishkin again:
   

   #2 – Linking Out Incentivizes Links In
   With a few notable exceptions (Wikipedia & YouTube, I’m looking in your direction), websites that earn links tend to do a good job of linking out themselves. When you link out, it creates a signal to other websites and content creators that you’re a willing participant in the web’s natural linking environment and not a closed-off community or purely self-referential, pompous know-it-all.

   The more you link out to others, the more you encourage them to link back to you. If you produce quality content then you will be linked to. Keep producing quality content and you’ll keep getting linked to. Keeping linking out and you’ll keep getting linked to. It is likely that by linking out to 100 websites over a period of time that you’ll win back more links than you create. That’s because the Law of Reciprocity kicks in. The Law of Reciprocity says that people will return a favor that is given unselfishly just because they are able and willing. Do unto others and they’ll do unto you.

4. Why Waste Time Measuring Link Juice? – There are only 10 levels of PageRank. Are you really going to waste your time measuring link juice and numbers of pages and how your PR will be distributed across those pages? It’s a waste of time since the amount of link juice that gets distributed from page to page and link to link is so small that deciding not to link out because you are afraid of losing juice seems so absurd. The traffic and authority benefits of linking to quality pages far outweighs any loss of PankRank transference you may experience by linking to Uncle Joe’s website versus your own page on Monkey training.

The bottom line on outbound linking is it’s up to you. But before you make that decision do it on whether or not you’ll gain any benefit by linking to competitors and others within your field.