Outbound links can harm pagerank

I know this has been mentioned a thousand times but I'd like to add some more thoughts. I used one of my sites to plug an Adsense ready website I was promoting. After the new Pagerank update Google dropped my Pagerank. But, know the site I linked to has acquired a PR 3 status.

On one of my old site www.zhoog.com (which I never update anymore) I recently placed a link to an Adsense Ready website I was testing with. It had a Pagerank of 3, and after a recent Google update the PageRank dropped to 2. The inbound links stayed the same, the content stayed the same, only one direct link and one deep link to www.abc-articles.info was added.

This outbound link was the only factor that could have caused the PageRank drop. The site was probably balancing on the edge of PR 2 and PR 3 and this small factor caused this sudden drop.

The weird thing though, is that although the Adsense Ready website seems to have been punished by Google for duplicate content (sometimes didn't even show up for searching on the domain name) for a long time it now, 1 month later, has a PR 3.

It probably remained in the sandbox for the 6 months after launch (commonly said to be the normal sandboxing time), but I find it strange that a website with all this duplicate content has acquired a PR 3.

The only conclusions I can make from this story is that:
PR doesn't depend on having duplicate content, but PR does depend on linking to sites that have duplicate content.

Any thoughts on this?

Added on: February 27, 2007 - 5:30 pm