Google PageRank Leakage & Misconceptions on PageRank

Sometimes I get quotes like this

"Bottom line, out-going links are always a BAD IDEA for SEO. It creates what we in the SEO community call SEO hemorrhage. It BLEEDS off GOOD PR. Not a good thing. We actually NEED MORE incoming links."

and

Somewhere in Google's webmaster guidelines is a warning about having more than 100 outbound links on a page. My advice is to take that point very seriously.

Using the same principle proves, at least to us here in this one office, that 101 outbound links on a page (don't forget to count navigation links in the total) may lead to an immediate decrease in absolute PageRank even if it's not demonstrated in the toolbar.

These ideas are typically short sighted and miss a broader view of the web. Is it possible to start from scratch and build up a brand while being completely greedy with your link popularity? Sure it is, but generally it is going to be easier to create a useful site if you are willing to link out to some related resources.

Especially if you write about your industry you have to source some ideas or information. Why avoid social interaction? How can you only view links as a cost? If you link out enough sometimes they come back. Heck sometimes other content authors will even defend your brand for you without you even knowing about it.

What are search engines but link lists? And most of the links are free. And people come back and use them again.

I do have some clients that for a period of time did not link out to some sites that they should of. For about a year or so a client outranked their own manufacturer for the manufacturer brand name in Yahoo! and MSN. In that case I was greedy with the link popularity because I didn't want to lower our exposure. After Yahoo! started ranking the appropriate site #1 for the brand name then I freely linked out to it.

For most any site there are probably at least a few sites that can be linked to.

As far as controlling internal link popularity goes, the reason for the 100 link suggestion was based on page usability. How many options can you give a person before you give them too many to be useful?

As recently noted by Matt, crawl depth is typically a function of PageRank:

One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages. So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submit a sitemap), that doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply.

The theory that I have though is that you have to point at others thoughts that you find interesting if you hope to have others find you interesting. There is only so much one person can do. As a bonus to getting free content ideas by reading and linking at other people sometimes those links come back.

Some people have taken the PageRank funneling concepts to an extreme where they are even heavily using the link nofollow attribute on their own internal links, or whenever they point at official documentation on other sites. Both of which are usually bad form.

To snag a quote from DG

Sorry you fucksticks, but if you've ever used nofollow as anything other than a joke or to fuck someone else, yer an idiot, Just bend over and wrap yer lips around yer own asshole and suck until yer head explodes. At the very least, you'll reduce the number of stupid people that can breed. Follow?

I think things like many nofollows to internal pages might set off some sort of SEO flag. Just like being stingy with outbound links often forces some sites to have unnatural inbound link profiles.

It is just as easy to use links within your content to funnel your link popularity and actively drive users toward your desired goals. In the end goal to funnel visitors one way make sure you make it easy for them to go back in the other direction if they make a mistake or arrive on your site on the wrong page, otherwise you may hurt your conversion rates.

Bleeding PageRank is probably a bit arbitrary when you factor in the larger social aspects of the web. Plus some engines may also look at outbound links when trying to theme the content of your site.

Most content publishers have to vote for at least a few others before too many people are willing to vote for them. If you are a business selling products and services it still makes sense to link to business partners and other useful resources just to increase the depth and richness of your site without needing to recreate the web to do so.