[Smitty]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

3. can you point me to a single page, just one, anywhere, where you can discern even a miniscule negative effect of outgoing links?

Hint: The answer to question 3 is "No", just to save you the trouble.

As I said, PR bleed/leakage is a myth. Period.

nofollow was a Google creation from early 2005 that was supported by both MSN and Yahoo. It was designed to stop the search bots from following links that weren?t necessarily endorsed by the owner of the site it was on. It had a mixed welcome, but was incorporated by many of the major players in blogging. Google implies this is a link spamming issue mostly relevant to blogs. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/...ment-spam.html

Whether or not having lots of outgoing links to sites with unrelated subject matter is a factor in search results is unknown (for years I have heard links to sites with unrelated subject matter was 'bad'), but from reading around a bit most sites are abandoning the tag. Then again, Wikipedia now uses the rel="nofollow" tags on all outgoing links.

We all have our own SEO theories, but since none of us know the actual algorithms used, no matter what we do we're guessing.

Personally I don't use the tag, but that's just my position.