Pagerank Hoarding

I just read an article on Pagerank hoarding by using javascript for your outbound links to hold on to your pages Pagerank. One thing is that it looks like Google is now able to follow javascript links (which I think they have been able to do for awhile) and the second, if Google finds you doing this, you could be penalized.

http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreport ... eRank.html

what about blocking google using cgi scripts to cloak links?

I think google can see them because my link is listed on a page that does this, and I show up #16 and #17 with that sites url when searching for my keywords.

IMHO in some cases (but not always!) Google can go the link and bring PR to the site even if this link is in JavaScript. And secondary - PR may sink on the pages that have not outgoing links

I don't actually use javascript links, but I don't see why google would penalize your site if you did. Unless there are particular patterns that you can measure that suggests someone is hoarding PR, but I'm not sure you could justify a penalty in all cases.

Well. I guess I should read the article you linked too!!!!

Couldn't you just do this:



Then, block links.js in robots.txt

Would this work?

Hi friends,

I would suggest the following:

a) Never go for cloaking or any similar activities. As Google robots are getting intelligent and improving every day. Last year my personal homepage was penalized and removed from Google index for this.

b) As joker commented. A should have atleast 1 or 2 outgoing links else its called a dangling page.

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet..........Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

A dangling link is a link to a page that has no links going from it, or a link to a page that Google hasn't indexed. In both cases Google removes the links shortly after the start of the calculations and reinstates them shortly before the calculations are finished. In this way, their effect on the PageRank of other pages in minimal.

c) I think all sites should have outgoing links not only for search engines but also as a service to your site visitors to find related sites easily.

d) As per official google webmaster guidelines its always advisable to keep the number of links on each page less then 100.

I hope this would be of some help to all.

Cheers