We know inbound links are essential to SEO, but what about outbound links from my site?  Do they help?  Do they hurt?

The simple answer, direct from Google, is “no” they don’t hurt your rankings.  In most cases.

Outbound links help you to build relationships with your users and with other webmasters.  By linking to quality websites with relevant content you can give visitors extra information, establish trust in your content and possibly even gain links from the sites you link to.

But, and it’s a big but, this doesn’t apply to all outbound links.  Google doesn’t like comment spam, and they don’t like undisclosed paid links.  Quite frankly, your users probably don’t like them that much either.

Both can be dealt with though.  There are a number of techniques you can use to reduce comment spam.  Moderating the comments on your site, adding the “no follow” tag to links in comments or asking for verification in your comment form can all help.

Google has this to say about paid outbound links:  “Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines.”

If you are being paid to include undisclosed outbound text links, you are breaking the rules. And you will be penalised.  If you are in the habit of selling links you must use the “no follow” tag in your link, or redirect to an intermediate page that is blocked by a robots.txt file to stay in Google’s good books.

As long as you link to suitable sites when it’s appropriate – any more than 100 links on a page will cause concern – you don’t need to worry.  Outbound links appear on every good website, and including them on yours will just build your credibility.

If you want to find out more read Google’s post on outbound links.

+++

Katie Saxon

Google has removed the Page Rank score from WebMaster tools.  No more little green barchart tellinig me my score from 0-10.  This is about a strong a signal as you can get from Google to say Page Rank just isn’t important.

Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, explained the reason for the removal:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it”

WebMaster Tools is Google’s essential, free set of tools to help you diagnose and  fix problems with  your website, discover links to indivdidual pages on your site, see the top queries driving visitors to your site, find suggestions for improving your site.

Despite removing the Page Rank information from Webmaster Tools, Google just can’t bring itself to remove page Rank Ran from the Google Toolbar.  Too many Page Rank Junkies would have a hissy fit, and it must be easier just to leave it there rather than take all the flak.

This isn’t something new;  we’ve been writing the misleading nature of Page Rank for quite a few years.  And our Page Rank articles still tend to be very popular in terms of readership:

1. Google Page Rank Update (Oct 2007)
2. Search Engine Optimisation Myths (Feb 2007)
3. Page Rank Update (May 2008)

Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim for the Google quote: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/google-is-finally-killing-pagerank.html

PageRank Sculpting is a search engine optimisation technique that manipulates the flow of PageRank “juice” as one page links to another page.

At its very simplest, the theory goes that a link to a page counts as a vote for that page. If a page has lots of links to a lots of different pages, then the value of the votes are diluted, making each vote worth less.

PageRank Sculpting utilises the “nofollow” attribute on selected links, thus instructing Google that it should not pass any “link juice” to pages that aren’t important.

Typical use of the nofollow link attribute might be on links to your Terms & Conditions page, or your Privacy Policy, or your Accessibility page. You aren’t keen to have these pages rank well in the search engine results, and so you don’t want to pass any link juice to these pages from your Home Page.

But you could also use Page Rank Sculpting to try to focus deliberately focus link juice on your most important products and services, at the expense of other links to pages on your site.

Page Rank Sculpting takes quite a lot of planning and effort, and so what you want to be asking yourself is is it worth it?

Maybe, maybe not.

• For most small business websites, having a well planned site will naturally give the same effect as deliberate Page Rank Sculpting. You are likely to have links to the content that is most useful to your visitors. You are likely to have fewer links to less important stuff. And you don’t link to the irrelevant stuff.

• You might be better off using your time instead to generate great content, or work on getting links from high quality, relevant sites.

• If you try to be too clever using the nofollow attribute, then you risk damaging your visibility in the search engines if you get it wrong.

• And Page Rank Sculpting is only of secondary importance to the main focus of your search engine optimisation: content and reputation.

• A good example of where Page Rank sculpting is appropriate would be a large e-commerce website where a category page will have multiple links to the same product page: a link from the picture of the product, another link from the name of the product, and finally an identical link coming from “Product Info”. Using page rank sculpting means you would tell Google to ignore 2 of those 3 identical links, and focus all the link juice on the one link, thus making it more important.

It is that time of year again, folks. Google is updating our websites Page Rank.

And once again, small businesses go barmy over the magic number that displays in the Google Toolbar. I have to admit I am pleased to see my Page Rank returned to 5, following being downgraded to PR 4 in October.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: your Google PageRank score is not an indicator of how well your pages are going to rank in the Google search engine results.

Consider it an overall health check score from Google. If you get high quality, topical, trusted sites linking to your website, then up goes your Page Rank.

Buy links, sell links, get spammy links, or generally try to artificially manipulate your linking, and then down goes your Page Rank.

I am aware of several clients having an improved Page Rank, and I welcome feedback from other site experiencing a Page Rank change.

Looks like another Google PageRank update is underway.

Here’s a screen shot showing the update taking place on my own site, moving the my PageRank up from 4 to 5 across the many Google Data Centres (DC):

You can check your changing Page Rank at a number of places:

Live PageRank Checker

PageRank Checker Tool

Remember, PageRank isn’t really an indicator of where your site is positioned in Google’s search engine results. It’s just one measure of the importance Google places on your site.