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I recently had a client that was concerned that his link popularity was being leeched by his outgoing links.

In other words, he was concerned that sites he linked to were inheriting too much of his own link popularity.

In this article, I thought I’d explore this issue and provide some recommendations on how to handle your outbound linking strategy.

There are times you will link to another site for one reason or another.  Sometimes, these sites offer supplementary information, such as a manufacturers site.  Or, they offer consumer information, such as consumer reviews.

In even other instances, you will link to a site that you recommend to your visitors.  Sometimes that site will link back to you, but other times it won’t.

These are all examples of outbound links which ultimately benefit from your generosity.

You see, link popularity flows through links.  That’s how sites earn their link popularity, by other sites linking to them.

Google has tapped into this web technique and has based itself around the idea that sites that have links to them must be popular and are therefore of better quality.

Google even devised an algorithm around this link popularity called PageRank.

But, like any web algorithm, holes were soon discovered and exploited.  Webmasters began trading links and building link farms to positively influence their PageRank.

Even today, site owners and webmasters are concerned with the effects of links, both incoming and outgoing.

As I mentioned above, I had a client come to me some time ago and wanted my opinion on how to handle his outgoing links.  You see, on many of his pages he had links to other related sites.  And since his site had a high link popularity, he was afraid that the other sites would benefit too much from it.

He wanted to know what effect, if any, these outgoing links were having on his site.  Were they leeching his high PageRank or were they merely receiving a supplementary benefit from a couple of well placed links?

The first thing I asked him was if he was receiving any benefit, monetary or otherwise from having these links on his site.  His response was that the links were there for his site visitors.  He was trying to be a “one stop shop”.

I then asked him where these links appeared on his site.  Since his site was template driven, these links appeared on every single page on the site.

We then counted the outbound links to see how many there were.  It turns out that over half of the links on most of his pages were outbound.  On some pages, the number exceeded 90%.

At this point, I told him he should consider making the links non-spiderable either by using JavaScript to make it so the crawlers couldn’t follow them or adding a “rel=nofollow” tag to the links. When he asked why, I explained it to him this way:

Consider the link popularity or PageRank for a given page.  Each link on that page, whether internal or external, inherits a portion of that value.  If there are 10 links on a PageRank 4 page, then each link inherits 1/10 of that value.

On pages where there are more internal than external links, this isn’t so bad because proportionally more link popularity is transferred within the site then is sent out to other sites.

But, on those pages where 9 out of every 10 links is an external link, most of the link popularity for that page is transferred out of the site.

Overall, upon analyzing his site we found that about 35%-40% of all of his links were outbound links, which means, in essence, that 35% of his link popularity was flowing into his site and out through those links.

I should throw in a caveat here – I am oversimplifying the whole issue of link popularity and transference here, but I did it this way to make a point with the client.  While there are many other factors at play, in essence this was what was happening with his site.

Because he was essentially only receiving 65% of his “true” PageRank, we came up with a strategy to reduce the number of outbound links to about 15%.  That means that he would maintain 85% or more of his link popularity within his site.

Through the aforementioned JavaScripting of links and adding “nofollow” tags to others, we reduced the amount of PageRank inheritance flowing out of the site.  The results were almost immediately noticable.

Within a couple of months, the PageRank on his internal pages jumped almost two full points.  While his homepage at the time was PageRank 6, the internal pages were only at the 3-4 range.  After the change, the internal pages jumped to a 5 or 6 value while the homepage went up to 7!

This happened mostly because he redirected some of the link inheritance back into the site which helped inflate the link popularity of all the pages of the site, pushing them all up.

So, in answer to the question, ‘Is it better to limit outgoing link popularity?’ My answer is, most definitely.

While you do want to have some outgoing links to make your linking appear natural, it is also important to stem the flow of link popularity going out through those links.

Not only that, but ensuring that most of your link popularity stays within your site also helps improve the site’s link popularity overall.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.