The debate, should I link out or not? Back in mid March, I wrote an entry named Share the PageRank Wealth or Else! which discusses the possibility of being penalized to some degree if you are found to be hoarding your pagerank. This new topic is different in the fact that people believe that you can see immediate positive results in ranking by simply linking to your competitors.
According to a thread over at WebmasterWorld, several members are reporting that soon after they linked out to their competitors, their rankings have improved. As one member says, "I linked to a site that was doing better than mine [in the rankings] using my keywords in the anchor text and what happens, I'm back in the top 5."
Ross a full member at WebmasterWorld deserves to be quoted here, "Thirdly, it helps even more if you own the other related site you are linking to." So if you have a network of sites, of course link to it. What this means is that Google really isn't looking for you to link out to your competitors but rather link to other sites in your industry. This does not mean you should run out and build new sites, but feel free to send a link to one of your biggest rival sites on the Web.
