I managed to get caught up in a thread on the webmasters talk forum wether outgoing links reduce a websites Page Rank. The discussion went on for ages going around in circles a guy called chrishirst refused to admit he was wrong, must have been hard to admit your wrong to a seemingly newbi. He was resovled that:

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

You can read the thread here, you can see why I wouldn't give up. The argument was insane, even though I had defeated every one of his points he still couldn't bring himself to admit the possiblity thier maybe the smallest chance that the employee at google may be clever than him.

The discussion was stuck on this point; 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 repeated the same points for ages, I tried to explain that the formula was done from scratch so all that it needed was for the calculated value to be less than it was before to have effectively been ‘drained’ but to no avail.

There are a few things that need to be understood when figuring out how the Page Rank calculation works:

• The equation is repeated multiple times.
• 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.
• Each time the calculation is done it is done from scratch; no prior Page rank is worked in the equation.
• The calculation is done for each individual page not site.

This is how it can be though about. Bear in mind this is highly simplified (and if you want to go into specific details it is wrong).

At the begining of the equation each index page is given a value of 1; part of the pagerank is given as a vote which is devided between all the pages that it links point 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 the pervious pagerank that has been gain on pervious calulation can be passed on. The Calulation is repeated lots of times. So because your vote is devided between the pages that you have links to, if you give all your vote to pages that link back to you on the next vote (calulation) 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.

And this is the main point if you link out of your site, to a website that does not link back to you. The pagerank is not coming back to your site so you are going to drain/leak/lose pagerank.

How much effect does page rank have on your sites ranking? Well that is a completely different question.

Here's some groovy stuff using the old googster. Here is more craziness form the boys at walnut smoothie email joke. Persently I doing a logo for a site called modern cleo but the site isn't up yet, I guess it will be at www.moderncleo.co.uk but I can't confirm yet.

Bye-Bye

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