October 20, 2008 by James Oliver
Because Google is so obsessed with links and the amount of them pointed at a particular page, many people worry about their outbound links and the way they may affect their PageRank. These worries are, more often than not, completely unfounded. Due to Google’s aforementioned obsession with links, sudden drops in PageRank are almost always to do with the amount or strength of incoming links.
If you do experience a PageRank plummet your first port of call has to be a tool like a ‘Site Strength Indicator,’ that will let you check your incoming links and the strength of those sites linking to you. Unfortunately, the curse of Google’s system is that all it takes is a relatively small decline in the number of links or the strength of a linking site to affect you considerably.
Outbound links can also affect your PageRank but usually only if you add a large volume of links all at once, even then the change is rarely noticeable. The only way you’re really going to affect it properly is if you implement a policy of linking heavily site-wide, ie. if you have more than five links on every web page.
Essentially, in the world of the internet there’s things far worthier of your worries than outbound links, so don’t lose any sleep.
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