iJoomla Redirect http://www.ijoomla.com/ijoomla-redirect/ijoomla-redirect/index/

Hello iJoomla,

There is absolutely no proof you leak PR by outgoing urls on your site. Google explains you give pagerank to the site you are linking to, but at the same time you don't loose that piece of pagerank. It's like copying a piece of pagerank. The more urls on your page, the less pagerank per url you copy.

This product only gives you statistics and blocks other sites from gaining pagerank from you (which you also achieve by just using nofollow links). There is no pagerank benefit in it for your own site.

Sorry I had to react on this. I really don't see the added value. You sell great products but this is not one of them.

Regards,
Chris

Sorry Chris, but I have to say that I cannot agree with you.  There have in fact been several studies which produced results that clearly indicate that you do in fact leak PR with outgoing links. 

Based on a comparison of pages created specifically to test the premise, it can be seen that for Google, Yahoo and MSN that a page with NO outbound links will rank higher than a page with outbound links.  Further, the same testing revealed that this negative impact is so consistent that IF you in fact have outbound links which contain your desired keywords in the anchor text, that the PR leak is even higher.  You can minimize that impact by using something as basic as "click here" or something like that (I know that this sounds strange, but it in fact works).


In a nutshell, PageRank is a calculation used to determine the "authority" of any web page.  PageRank is a measure of authority that determines the absolute value of a web page based upon the number of sites linking to that page AND by the quality and relatedness of those sites.
For example, if the (Google) PageRank formula is:  {(1-d)+a (RS)} * {(1-e)+b (PR * fb)} * {(1-f)+c (LS)}
[RS is relevance score; d or e or f are dampening controls; a or b or c are weighting controls; PR is PageRank; fb is the scale used by Google, non-linear and is exponential; LS is LocalScore]

So...based on analysis of Google "behavior" indicates that the weighting of the above results in: Relevance Score is 20%, PageRank is 40% and LocalScore is 40%.  Which means that every link that you have outgoing, unless it returns to you as an expert link, can in fact as is suggested by the folks here at iJoomla...can cause significant PageRank "bleading."

There is more to the whole picture though in that you also must be smart in how you approach improving your PageRank.  Any reciprocal link from a link farm, for example, can also cause problems.  The basis is that while you cannot control who links to you, you can control who you link to.  So linking to a link farm who then provides a reciprocal link  will result in a penalty to your site.

Now, here's the critical part that perhaps hasn't been fully explained...outbound links are a drain on the PageRank...and to counter the drain you generally try to get a reciprocated link...but the question to ask is what happens when you have an outbound link which leads your users to some external page -- say for example, an information page which would have no reason to reciprocate link to your site?  You cannot control that....and it does in fact result in PageRank drain, exactly as is suggested in the iJoomla Redirect information.

The solution?  PageRank is ONLY leaked when Google recognizes the link to another site.  However, if you use links that Google doesn't or cannot recognize...no PageRank drain.  And there are ways to do this...and not having yet tried Redirect but going from their descriptions...that's quite likely what is ongoing here.  You instead have a link which does link outbound, but it cannot be counted.

I've been involved at the very core of not the SEO business -- but as a part of what the SEO business tries to understand (meaning that SEO folks try to optimize for what is done where I have been involved at the most senior levels) -- for almost a decade.  I'm quite confident of the above.

Hi Chris,

Here's an answer to your pondering of why Google or anyone else does what they do....not a "good" answer, but the answer.      IMHO, most of what has been done to impact SEO has more to do with curbing the game playing than anything else.  It helps to understand that bots are....well, they're still pretty much still sitting at the state of the art of technology of 1995 (or so).  Which makes it easy to game them.  Add to that the fact that many folks played significant games with meta tagging and such.  The end result is that without someone doing something it would become nearly impossible to actually find any of the content that you or your site customers are looking for.  So the "something" that has and is being done is directed toward trying to stem the tide of game playing and to try to give everyone the best shot at finding what they want.

One thing that I'd like to toss out -- think of this as something to ponder...what makes anyone think that bots **actually** comply with "nofollow" tags?  If you closely and frequently follow your site logs you might be surprised to see what pages are accessed by bots of some kind.  What most folks don't understand is that there is no rule, regulation, law, etc., which says that a bot cannot index and follow any and all tags.  The construct of each individual bot determines whether or not it follows the robots.txt or meta tag conventions.  But it is entirely up to the bot source.

And perhaps here is an even better thing to ponder....what makes anyone think that Google's bots comply with those tags?  What the vast majority of folks don't seem to know (although Google readily admits to it) is that Google complies with the "googlebot" tag.  Which is separate and in addition to any other bot tags.  So, absent the googlebot tag...well, you get the idea.

For example, if you want Google's bots to not follow any link, this is the only tag that will be followed:
<meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow">

Other useful tags include:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

Or a combined:  <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive, nofollow">

And here's one that you also may not be familiar with:
<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

The above one is to ask bots to not use any of the site descriptions created at the Open Directory Project (ODP).  Or to be sure it ALSO includes Google:  <meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP">
That one prevents Google from not using the site descriptions created at the Open Directory Project (ODP).

But another problem is that even if you don't publish any links and even with bot exclusions, the first time that somone does follow that...then the URL will likely appear in the referrer log at the other server and so then it is likely that it will then be followed by Googlebot.

And just when you think that you have a handle on all of this...let me throw another wonk factor into it -- if your site or the site that you're connected to are included in the Google Feedfetcher or Google Reader....then ALL robots.txt files will be ignored (Google specifically designed them to do that)....and I strongly suspect that means that bot tags are also ignored.


And one last point to ponder....if PR is your thingie...meaning what you would like to focus on or worry about (at the moment), think about what might be the impact to your own PR if you had no outbound links to any site other than your own.  For example, what if you created 40 different sites...each with relevant and related content...each with outbound links which contain keywords of focus...and you link all your sites together in one big cross-listed daisy chain?  And what if you did that...and then had very few, and carefully selected outbound links to other "expert" sites? In short, what if all your page bleeds were to yourself, but at a large scale?  Something to wonder about, isn't it? 

Regards,

Dan

Unfortunately, we can not guarantee that this component/mambot will increase your page rank by x number of points. If Google made it known exactly how to increase page rank, then people could exploit it. If you are unsure about the technology present in this component/mambot, then you may not want to spend your money on it. We believe this to be true, but the Google Algorithm is not public knowledge. So, do some research and if you find that this software will service your need, then please use it. If you find that it may not, then save your money.

Sorry for the indirect answer.