If you’ve been using JavaScripts on outbound links from your webpages in an effort to preserve your PageRank you should quit – for two reasons.
Discuss PageRank hoarding in WebProWorld.
For one, “Google engineers have stated in a few places lately that they are extending Googlebot’s ability to read and understand JavaScript. Especially links in JavaScript,” said Black_Knight in the Cre8SiteForums.
These sorts of techniques used in conserving PageRank are potential red flags to Google engineers out there hunting for sites that use “aggressive” seo tactics.
If you’re using this tactic on your site you’re liable to be penalized, though DigitalPoint, in discussion with Black_Knight, suggested, for the sake of the argument, not for practice, that to avoid detection one can simply put the JavaScript in an unspiderable external file.
The other reason you should continue linking is that Google also penalizes “dead end” sites or “PageRank Sinks,” as Dan Thies calls them in a post on the ihelpyou forums.
In light of an early paper on the PageRank concept Thies states, “it is very reasonable to suggest that Google doesn’t like a site that doesn’t link out at all.”
In the same thread Dan discredited the idea that linking to authority sites with high PageRank, such as Google, could return sites to the index and boost ranking.
Garrett French is the editor of murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
