Outbound links can they lower your page rank?

Not really. All new posts you make contribute to your sites overall pagerank. If you're outbound linking on those posts, it just makes the overall PR of that post lower.

HOWEVER.

If you're linking via a sidebar, menu etc that appears on the homepage, then YES, you will be transferring page rank away.

The PR of the page won't change by adding more outbound links. All that changes is the worth of one of those outbound links.

Ok well I did add the backlinks via a sidebar that appears on each and every single one of my pages via wordpresses link feature.

Since doing this I've added say a handfull to relevant sites it dropped my pr I thought it'd only help

Outbound links will not affect your PR.

If you lost PR on the page, you've lost backlinks/backlink-PR pointing at the page that created the PR to begin with.

Some link juice does flow away from your page when you link out. Think about it. When a search engine spider crawls your site it follows all links - whether they stay on your site or leave. The bot leaves your site and gives the site you linked to more authority. It has to get the ranking from somewhere - this is called page rank leakage.

Here is an excerpt from my free on-page SEO guide:

a page that has incoming links is getting page rank from each of the links coming in. The higher the page rank of each link coming in the better for that page and higher the page rank goes.

On the flip side as that page links to other pages it divides page rank between each link it sends out. Therefore with too many links going out the rank is diminished with each link. So there is a slight balancing act to be employed – get high links coming in and give a few high value links going to the right pages. How can you control it = no-follow tags. Assign this tag to those pages you don’t care if they rank (terms & conditions, privacy etc.) and you can increase the value of other links and the overall page rank in general. Now you are dividing page rank between fewer pages.

Here is what it will look like when using it in your HTML code;

<a href=”terms.html” rel=”nofollow”>Terms and Conditions</a>

I also think there is a sticky link at the top of the Forum in this section about page rank.

Yes, linking out to external sites lowers your own PageRank.

Those that believe otherwise aren't thinking through the entire link graph.

Let's say you have 9 links on your index page, and all 9 go to other pages of your site. 100% of the PageRank your page gains from external links pointing to you is passed on to those 9 links. Other pages of your site also have links back to your index and such, so some of that PR you're sending out to these pages is being sent back to the index, contributing to its PR value.

Now you add one link to an external site. Now there are 10 links on your page; 90% of the PageRank coming in to the index is distributed to the links to other pages of your site, which are all now returning to the index at best 10% less PageRank than they previously did. That one external link is taking 10% of the PageRank you previously kept within your site to the external site.

I just used "your index page" as an understandable example. The same applies to every page of your site, assuming they all contain at least one internal link.

If you'd like, you can manually write out the matrix representing links within and leaving your site. The matrix has as many rows and columns as there are webpages (internal and external). The value in each (row,column) pair should be the 1 if there is a link from the page the row represents to the page the column represents, 0 otherwise.

Now apply the computation in the simplified PageRank algorithm section to calculate the dominant eigenvector of your matrix. Those are the approximate PageRank values of the pages.

Now adjust your matrix to reflect the new external link, and recalculate.

This simplified model won't tell you the actual PageRank, but it can give you an idea of how the system changes when you add a link.

For a large site with decent PR and links on pages several levels deep, the effect on the overall PR of the site will be negligible. But for a PR2 site selling multiple external links from main pages, it can definitely be responsible for the drop.

Basically all incoming links (and other factors) are summed up to determine your PR.
This PR equals 100% of what you can pass on to other pages (external or internal).
These 100% are divided by the number of links that point away from this page. So 1 link would receive 100% ...if you have 5 links each would only receive 20%.

One theory says that keeping all PR inside the page helps. I believe that this looks highly unnatural and could be a footprint. In my experience linking out (most do follow, some no follow) has never hurt any of my sites. I just make sure that the links are relevant and not bad neighborhood. Linking out to authority sites is something I often do and in my experience it even helps.

IMHO outbound links (if relevant, not bad neighborhood) can hardly hurt or lower your PR. More likely your incoming links have lost PR and/or link juice. This happens (for instance) when linking sources add links themselves and you end up with getting a lower percentage of their 100%.

Quickly adding irrelevant side bar links (that have been devalued anyway) can be a bad sign for Google though... selling links is not something they promote.

It will help you more if it will comes from high page rank website. It does not matter it will gives you Do Follow of No Follow back links. You have to get back links from various source.

PR up and down is dependent on too many factors and I don't think your sites' PR down is caused by outbound link.

Most of warriors here told, PR depends only on back links and outbound links don't matter and affect the PR. Thats wrong. OBL also considered in calculating the PR. Actually, i wish to show the formula of PR,

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

PR(A) is the PageRank of page A,
PR(Ti) is the PageRank of pages Ti which link to page A,
C(Ti) is the number of outbound links on page Ti and
d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1.

I hope you all got it. If you have sites with high OBL it will suffer a site which you are linking to. IT wont suffer your own site.

outbound links does not affect seo..

Let's say you only have backlinks pointed at inner pages and none to your homepage, so your homepage is getting the pagerank from the inner pages. So let's say your homepage is PR3.

Now you place 50 outbound links on each of your inner pages, means the juice gets divided so less juice for your homepage, so yes your homepage PR does drop in the next update cause of the outbound links on the inner pages.

An outbound backlink will indirectly lower the pagerank of the specific page you have the outbound backlinks on. This is because it will reduce the PageRank of every other page on your site, which will in turn reduce the pagerank of the specific page with outbound links.

However, if you have a healthy site with good natural backlinks, I wouldn't stress over outbound backlinks.

I would agree that you want to create a natural link profile, both inbound and outbound. You should not only have nofollow outbound links... rather have a mix. Don't have an unusually high number of outbound links, but you should have some. Google aims to penalize sites that try to hoard PR.

I was taught that outbound links only can drop your organic rankings