Quick SEO Tips – Can linking to other sites harm my Page Rank?

Overheard this question at a discussion – “What happens when I link to many sites from my site? Does it affect my Page Rank? I have a looong blogroll, you know.”

Indeed a very authentic doubt. Fortunately there’s nothing to fret about.

Let me take an example now.

Let’s assume we have four sites. Site A – And Site 2, 3 and 4.

This is how the linking pattern is for all of them.

Site A (PR 6)
||
||
v
Site No. 2 (PR 5) [your site]
|| ||
|| ||
v v
S.3 S.4

Now, Site A has lot if incoming links from valuable sites that it manages to get a PR6. As per the above diagram, Site A links to Site 2, which gets a PR4.

Now, let’s assume that Site 2, links to lot of sites (including Site 3 and 4..upto Site 10).

The question is whether Site 2 will lose all it’s Page Rank linking to 10 different sites or not.

And the Answer is NO.

What happens is instead of Site No.2 losing it’s page rank, all the 10 different sites it linked to will get probably PR 1 (PR5/10)

Had it linked to just one site, (Say only S3) then it would’ve received a PR 4, because PR5 is not shared with ten other sites.

So in effect, when a site links to more number of sites, there’s nothing much happening to the original Page Rank of the site, but it will affect the sites it is linking to. If the PR5 site link to fewer sites, then they have a higher chance of getting a better PR, but at the same time, if PR5 site links to ten different sites, then obviously the PR5 has to be shared with all of them so, each website will get a lesser PR. Again, no effect to the initial Page Rank of 5 to the original site.

This is the reason why you should be careful while “selecting” links from other websites. If there are many other sites sharing links with you (like on a bloroll), the you are likely to get lesser PR, while if you source it from sites that links o lesser sites, you have a better chance to get a higher page rank.

So guys with long blog rolls – no problem , add more.

Related reading- Imp of incoming links.