Hi

I run a number of very large travel forums, and have tried to make
them worthwhile portals with associated (restaurant, sports, etc.)
pages containing a large number of wholy relevant outbound links to
sites I have taken a lot of time and trouble over finding.

I am now told doing this hurts my Page Rank with Google. Especially as
a lot of these links go to sites with very low PR (as they are, maybe,
articles someone wrote who has no idea about ranking their site highly
on the Internet).

I wondered, if this is true, would it pay me to recreate these links
to go to internal frames pages (with "noindex,nofollow" metatags) with
the target external URL forming the lower frame content?

Would this stop me losing my PR? After all, I have earned it, and want
to give users of my non profit sites some good external material, but
don't want to suffer from my own good intentions?

Thanks

Mark

The best way to answer your questions about Page Rank is to review the
information at the following link:

://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

If you have additional questions, please email Google at:

help@google.com

Thank you for your interest in Page Rank!

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Request for Answer Clarification by travlur-ga on 18 May 2002 23:00 PDT

Sorry, that page has absolutely no content on it specific to my
question.

Please read my question and reply as to whether I can avoid losing PR
off my site by the described or other methods.

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Clarification of Answer by google_answers-ga on 20 May 2002 00:13 PDT

For specific help with Google search and Page Rank concerns, and if
you have not found the information you require on the links provided,
the best way to get your questions answered is to email:

help@google.com

Google Answers is neither designed nor intended to be a place for help
with specific concerns or 'how-to' questions about Google search.

Thank you for your interest in Google Answers!

The answer just referred me to a generic Google page with no
information on the subject I asked.

The internal frame has the link to the external pages, so it does not
help getting better PageRank using internal frames that have links to
external pages.

As far as I understand the information on PR, links from your site
make no difference it's links to your site which count.

Google Technology
://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Says:

"In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote,
by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume
of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that
casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important"
weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." "

So I would suggest that rather than spend time and money altering your
site you concentrate on contacting other relevant web site owners to
seek links from them to your sites.  This will increase your PR score
as these inbound links are indexed, as long as the search terms are
relevant to your content of course!

Thanks

But getting inbound links is another issue. And outbound links do hurt
your site. I suggest you see the answers one of Google's staff posts
on webmasterworld.com

So I have started an experiment. I have used a cgi redirect tool in my
cgibin with a robots forbid entry for that sub directory in my
robots.txt file. We shall see :-)