I am starting to share my observations in the globalwarming awareness2007 seo contest. In this first post i want to deal with outbound links weight. Some people are used to say on seo websites and forums that they do not link to external websites. That is quite illogical they are creating a dead-end for the search engines bots and also for visitors which is absolutely not the spirit of the web. I think there have been many improvements since Gray Wolf released his study case on that topic. As far as i am concerned i think outbound links can be a bonus for the ranking of a website but you will have to be very careful with who you are linking to. It seems quite obvious that the search engines expect webmasters to be responsible of the external links they are creating. In the original pagerank algorithm each link is considered as a vote for the page where it leads. I think it is more and more important to consider the hub score in the seo strategy of a website. If you want to find more informations about the outbound links weight and how it can be benefit for your ranking you should search about co-citation and read this excellent post of Jim Boykin.

To finish if you want to add a link to an authority website i advice you to link to this globalwarming awareness2007 entry ;)