Now, I know this had a lot of you concerned.  After all, Google’s pretty much big dog these days.  if Google suddenly declared you had to kill a live chicken once a week in order to keep your page rank I’d bet a whole lot of us would be out looking for cleavers.

But for those of you who might have been concerned, linking outward really has nothing to do with your page rank.  It’s not a zero-sum game–your incoming links to other pages help their page rank, but they don’t specifically hurt yours.  Page rank is only measured by the number and quality of INCOMING links.

Though there is one caveat in the sense that, if you’re close in terms of page rank to another page, and you link to that page, you might bump that other page up sufficient to where you’ll drop.  But your number of outgoing links isn’t likely to directly affect you by much.

So link away, folks, you’re only helping others and giving you a chance to get links of your own.