Aaron Wall had a great post today about Black Hole SEO in which he called out The New York Times, among others, for hording Page Rank by refusing to give links.
The idea may appeal to some, but it is a recipe for failure. Page Rank hording is an illusion. Linking out to an authority site actually helps your site be authoritative. My take is that Google probably manages internal Page Rank flow and external flow separately. Linking out to an external page has nothing to do with how much juice you can pass internally.
The willingness of bloggers to liberally link out whenever they write a post has a lot to do with how much easier it is for a blog to rank than a typical commercial site with the same amount of content and link juice. This generous link profile also explains why so many conspiracy SEOs think that .orgs and .edu sites are preferred by Google. Not for profits and particularly academic sites tend to include a lot of citations. Only commercial sites fail to link out or put all of there outbound links on a single page.
Black Hole Linking profiles are pretty easy for Google to spot. A big site without outbound links probably sticks out like the Great Wall of China– search engines can from outer space!
So, play the link of forward. The world will reciprocate.
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