There are a lot of myths and misunderstanding about outbound links and what they do or don't do for your search engine rankings and PageRank.

Here are the facts.

#1. Outbound links will NOT help your search engine rankings or PageRank at all.

Some search engine gurus recommend having at least one outbound link to a high-ranking website on each page. You can do this if it helps make your page more useful to your visitors, but don't do it thinking it will help your rankings. It won't.

#2. Outbound links will NOT hurt your rankings or PageRank DIRECTLY.

Outbound links can hurt your rankings indirectly by "leaking" some of your PageRank vote off of your site. If you didn't have any outbound links, then all of your PageRank voting power would be passed on to your own internal pages which would come back to your Home and other pages.

That's why most of the time it's a good idea to have your outbound links on one "Links" or "Reference" page and NOT on your Home Page or other high-ranking pages.

Of course, sometimes it's necessary to have outbound links from your high-ranking pages to off-site pages to make your website more useful to your visitors or to get other websites to link to you from their high-ranking pages.

Important Seminar Announcement:

There's an important 2-day seminar going to be held in Orlando Florida, Feb. 7th and 8th, 2004. Make your plans to attend now while there's still room. Here's a link to complete information about the Subscription Website Publishers Association Seminar.

http://www.swepa.com/products/item7.cfm

Experts (the really big-name speakers who have been there and done it) in the field of Internet marketing will be speaking. I will also be speaking on Search Engines and Optimization. If you're looking to make money with your website, you don't want to miss this seminar.

Jerry Minchey

Copyright 2003 - 2004

Note: This article may be reproduced if it is reproduced in it's entirety and the statement below is prominently included at the end of the article.

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Jerry Minchey is a long time student and practitioner of search engine optimization and is the editor of the website, www.SearchEngineU.com which is dedicated to showing search engine beginners how to achieve high rankings on Google and other search engines using website optimization techniques. ========================================================