Does linking out "steal" link juice?

[hatfromthewilds]

As above.i think this was a thing long ago, but what about now?

Will page with 50 links out rank worse than page with 10 links out?

 

[hatfromthewilds]

a lot of huge websites in top 10 for hard kws, if not all of them, are linking out often (few links to few decimals of links per page) and all without nofollow tag.

 

[Mysterious Stranger]

As above.i think this was a thing long ago, but what about now?

Will page with 50 links out rank worse than page with 10 links out?

You need compare sites. When you have a medium quality site, with few reffering domains - it will affect it more, than strong site (The Guardian, for example), who got strong position in SERP and thousands of strong links pointing to it.

Your site can have 10 links = it will hurt it
The Guardian can have not only 50, but 50 000 OBL = it still don't give a f*** and ranks well

Simple as that

 

[terrycody]

Linking out is definitely will lose tiny parts of juice, but in the meantime, it can also give you some EAT scores (I guess), and consider most big sites are linking out very often, so conclusion, it may be better link out occasionally at least it looks natural, than pure 0 outbound.

 

[ACAjets]

I've tried A/Z testing this with a few of my sites - removed all of the outbound links for one site's category pages, and kept the do follow external links on the other site's category pages. From what little empirical evidence I was able to observe, it appears the pages with do follow outbound links (highly relevant, too) performed better after 3 months.

Of course, this all depends on what you're linking to, its value, and the relevance to your content.

Also, from what I understand, creating no follow external links still cuts into your page's 'total link juice' - for example, say you have 10 links on a page, 5 internal, and 5 external. Now, you change 4 of the external links to 'no follow'. You would think that now, your internal links would get 5/6th the page's juice, and your 1 external would get 1/6th - not so fast, apparently, you're still only giving 6/10th to internal links, and 1/6th to the single do follow external link.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[PbnGeek]

I don't think that having OBL can necessarily be a bad thing.
If you look at it from the point of view of a user who is searching for a particular 'keyword', if he lands on a page that is able to justify his query 100% then that will be the page that ought to rank on the top. Sometimes that means that you cannot have all these said resources and content on your page(7000 words for every post is a bit too much)- at that point, it is only natural to link out to pages/forums/resources which can better take up the said topic and explain it in detail.

This, in turn, should improve your page's relevance to the topic as it has not only relevant content w.r.t. the keyword but also, say, references to those pages which can further elaborate on the subject(should the user be interested). Google should then treat your page as a better-researched one and that could potentially help you out.