Decreasing Your Outgoing Links to Increase Page Rank & Relevance

Having too many outgoing links on your site can be a problem for a number of reasons. Firstly there’s less chance that the Search Engine Spiders will get caught & spider your whole site, therefore decreasing the number of pages you have listed in the index. Secondly, since the Bigdaddy update Google has placed more important on the type of sites you are linking to. If you own a site about pets & you have loads of outbound links in your footer that are linking to debt consolidation or mortgage sites then Google will assume that you’re either selling links or using these links for your own gain in order to achieve higher rankings for other sites. Appropiate use of the rel=nofollow tag will allow you to have links on your site & not get penalised for them. Obvisously if the links were on your site in the first place in order to help you get indexed then rel=nofollow is pointless, but it is useful to use it widely on your site in order to “direct” the spiders to the bits you want & don’t want indexed. If you have a blog or a site that has a large amount of affiliate links, using re=nofollow will top the spiders following these links therefore retaining your Page Rank & also keeping the spiders refreshing your content instead of someone elses. If you want to know how to set up rel=nofollow on links here’s an example:

[a xhref="http://www.adwordaffiliate.co.uk" mce_href="http://www.adwordaffiliate.co.uk" rel="nofollow"]Affiliate Marketing Software[/a]

This will create a link to this site here with an anchor text of Make Money Online, however the Search Engine Spiders will not follow the link because of the nofollow tag. Using these techniques you can help increase your page relevance to the spiders & also maintain the maximum page rank on your pages without filtering it off to other sites through links