This post follows the theme of the last one on "search engine ranking factors". The funny thing is that certain actions may have no bearing on your ranking in the SERPS, but may impact how your users feel about your site.
For example, misspellings may not penalize your page rank. They might even improve your PR. However your users may think less of your site if they spot misspellings. I know this has affected my impression of some product sites. On the flip side, using bold tags may not impact the SERPs much. But bold text can help focus a quick reader's attention. And that is a good thing.
Now others factors seem to have a significant and direct bearing on your page ranking. We all know that, in general, more inbound link mean higher page rank. But what about the outbound links. Do you get penalized if you link to other sites. Apparently it has to do with who you link to. Linking to a trusted site is OK. But linking to a bad neighborhood is bad.
My question is what happens if you link to nobody? Does this mean you lose no juice? Or are you expected to have some links otherwise you get a penalty? I would like to hear from somebody who has an opinion on this. Because at first I thought that a link meant that you give away some rank to the site you link to. If that was the truth, not linking would mean you do not lose any rank if you do not link out. However my hunch is that it is not this simple.
