"Ed Jay" <edMbj@aes-intl.com> wrote in message
news:42mgd3100t680t7pgq54jp1806cuq7pvmg@4ax.com...
> I'm made to understand that if a site has outgoing links, but few or no
> reciprocal or incoming links, the site is penalized in terms of Google
> page
> rankings. This presents a problem, as I need to link to several outside
> sources as references, with no chance of obtaining reciprocal links.

An important note to remember when reading about search engine optimization
on the internet: Almost everything you read is often just idle speculation
by one person who came to their stated results after observing said results
on one website: their own.

Like regarding this outgoing link stuff I can say: A few years ago I ran a
job portal website. This site had well over 10,000 outgoing links for its
content and less than 200 inbound links. BUT the home page (and 3 other
pages) was PR8 and most of the site was PR7 including the dynamic ASP pages
that generated all the links.

With those results I could make an observation like: "Linking your website
to a site with similar or related content that has a higher page rank (in
this case my job portal linking to Monster and such) must have some kind of
reciprocal effect!"

That'd be just about as correct as where you read about Google penalizing
people for having outbound links.

Unless somebody actually works for Google and saw/designed/programmed the
algorithms that operate the search engine, anything they say is going to be
casual observations and speculations on their part.