Outgoing links can they harm you PR?

I managed to get caught up in a thread on a forum concerning If Google Page Rank is drained by outgoing links. The thread went on for days continuously covering the same points mainly because chrishirst was wrong and refused to be beaten by a newbi, upstart like myself. He was very invested in the point that:

PageRank doesn't;
leak, drain, bleed , dissipate, evaporate, leech or is otherwise reduced by out going links.

If you read the thread here, you can see why I didn't want to quit. The conversation is bizarre, even though I (nixies@yahoo.co) had all the proof and experts backing me up he still refused to admit that thier maybe the smallest chance that the employee at google may be clever than him.

The debate was completely ground to a halt because; He could not get his head around how the equation only looked at incoming links how the outgoing links could reduce the amount of Page Rank you have.

We stood our ground for quite a while, I tried to exaplin the way the equation worked.

I have now word out that it is very hard to understand the equation unless you understand these points about how google calulates page rank:

• 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.
• The equation is repeated multiple times.
• Each time the calculation is done it is done from scratch; no prior Page rank is worked in the equation.

This is how it can be though about. Bear in mind this is a simplification (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 this value is given as a vote which is divided between all of the pages that it links to. So that gives you a new value. 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. The equation is done over and over again. So because your vote is devided between the pages that you have links to, if you link to pages that are voting for you then in the next calculation (vote) you are going to end up with more page rank than if you would have linked to a lot of pages that do not link back to you.

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

What effect page rank has on how well your site is ranked? Well that is a completely different question.

What about various new sites I found by reading other blogs. Here is more craziness form the boys at walnut smoothie email joke. I have been doing some work recently on this website: court house clinics. What do you think?

Anyway I'm off to run away and join the circus.

What will Google do next.

What are going to be googles next steps. Now this quote was made by Mel Strocen, Jayde Online CEO.

"Google's 'democratic' vision of the Web will never be achieved by manipulating algorithm criteria based on content. It will only be achieved by factoring in what is important to people, and people will always remain the best judge of what that is. The true challenge for search engines in the future is how to incorporate web searcher input and preferences into their ranking algorithms."

It does make sense with what google releasing Urchin without the monthly charge. it's a fantasic reporting tool, but it gives google pretty much all your traffic information.

Now if they can get enought of this type of information, it could massively alter the way they calulate the ranking.

These are some things that I think they will soon be capable to do quite effieciently.

1. Identify pointless links: basically if a link is never clicked on, you can persume it is just their for the search engines benefit.

2. Identify spammy pages: If someone goes to a page and then immediately click the back button. Then you can persume that is a vote agaisnt that page.

It's not all that easy though since they still have to sort out some issues mainly google will have huge black spots in it's research, google analytics and toolbar will only cover a small percentage of the massive amount of data out their..