The idea is that the more outside sites you link to, the less PR that is passed onto your internal pages. That indirectly reduces your PR because since your internal pages have less PR they don’t pass as much PR onto your home page.
This may be part of it, but I’m not so sure that PR has the same value it use to and myself am not worried about PR. Generally, a high PR site will likely have some authority, but its not due to the PR it’s due to other factors, and the PR is somewhat of a reflection of these things.
I think the big point here is “are all links created equal?”… I dont beleive so. If this is true, then what values are assigned to certain link types and how will these values be reflected on a site in terms of rankings.
I have done “crude” experiments with sites to test out some of these notions and it seems clear to me that there is a difference between links, even when the same link is received as a recip or one-way.
Maybe its time to do a more robust experiment where two sites (similiar in terms of on-page seo quality) receive identical links in different ways. One site does recips with the links, and the other receives all one-way links.
I’ll keep everyone posted on the results which should take a couple of months to see.
Lastly:
It’s SEO goofballism to think if the New York Times does a story about your site, and links to you, that you would be worse off if you linked back to the story.
In this very simple example point taken. But… in the real world things are not so simple. Patterns begin to emerge, and sites with 100% recips certainly make an easy pattern to spot. This is not a natural occurance and is obviously contrived. Heres a bit from google – “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.”
Arent recip link deals all about increasing ranking or PR? If so, then why would it be “goofballism” to beleive that recip deals (obvious schemes) would hold equal value to clean, one way links?
So, as much as I love the term “SEO goofballism” – I dont think the argument of one-ways vs. recips falls into “goofballism” territory.
lol… sorry for the long winded post – I really enjoy hashing out SEO ideas, conversations etc.
Cheers!