Recently I have been involved in a rather heated debate in a forum wether outgoing links reduce a websites Page Rank. The agrument seem to go on for ages just going over the same points again and again the main advocate was chrishirst, who refused to backdown and also refused to back up his own points. He was very invested in the point that:

At the end of the day PR as shown on the toolbar is of NO use for gaining useful convertable rankings.

You can see for yourself here, you can see why I didn't want to quit. The conversation is bizarre, even though I (nixies) even 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 thread hinged on this point; He could not get his head around how if the calculation was based only on incoming links how could outgoing links reduce the amount og Page Rank.

We repeated the same points for ages, I tried to get make him understand that the formula was done from scratch each time, and it did not need to be minus in the equation.

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 equation is repeated multiple times.
• The calculation is done for each individual page not site.
• 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 highly simplified (also if you look at the actual equation the specifics are wrong, it designed to make it easier to understand like went you find out that everythign you learnt in GCSE physic was all a lie when you do A Level Physic).

At the begining of the equation each index page is given a value of 1; 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 equation is repeated a least 40 times, so that the pages that have gained from the pervious calculation have more to vote. This process is repeated multiple times. 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 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 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? That is the million dollar question.

To end with some cool stuff I have been looking at. Did you ever want to buy nut and bolts on bulk? A lot of my readed do, they say hey that stuff all funny but where can I get a shed load of stainless steel nuts and bolts on the cheap. Well here. Now leave me alone. A quick plug for a website I have done some work with recently court house cosmetic surgery.

Bye-Bye

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