Will adding 1000's of outbound links to just a few website impact rankings?

[Your_Workshop]

I manage a large website that hosts 1000's of business listings that comprise an area that covers 7 state counties. Currently a category page (such as lodging)  hosts a group of listings which then link to it's own page. From these pages links are present directly to the business it represents. The client is proposing that we change all listings to link to the representative county website and remove the individual pages. This essentially would create 1000's of external links to 7 different websites and remove 1000's of pages from our site.
Does anyone have thoughts on how adding 1000's of links (potentially upwards of 3000) to only 7 websites (that I would deem relevant links) would affect SEO? I know if 1000's of links are added pointing to 1000's of websites the site can be considered a link farm, but I can't find any info online that speaks of a case like this.

[FedeEinhorn]

Couple of questions:

The Website is a directory and yet it points to only 7 outbound Websites?

What about using nofollow for all those links?

On the content side, you are about to loose much of the site's content, you should expect a massive traffic drop. What's the point of a Directory if it only links to 7 Websites without offering any extra valuable content?

[AlanMosley]

Yes it would. When you link out you lose PageRank.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

To minimize the lose of PR, you can add more links to your own site on the same page.

If you have a page and you have 3 internal links, and 1 external link. you are giving away 25% of your PR. but if you have 99 internal links and 1 External links you are only giving away 1%.

You are also losing content, and depending on your internal linking structure, you are more than likely going to lower the PR of your home page by removing sub-pages, again I refer to http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

Using no-follow will not help you, all link lose link juice.
There are way of using JavaScript to do this, but one day that may come back to bite you.

[DJ123]

Is there any hard data to back that up?  Just curious if there has been a study done over a ton of pages, links, etc.

[FedeEinhorn]

Adding more internal links so the linkjuice isn't diluted over 1 link would be like playing black hat SEO... I'm sure it will be seen as spam. A nofollow is enough. Still, a directory of only 7 sites without the inner pages is useless.

[AlanMosley]

Yes there is hard data, google released and patented there PageRank algorithm,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

This page is a simple explanation

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

A no-follow will not save any PageRank,, it will only stop it reaching the linked to page.

[Your_Workshop]

Thanks for all the info. We have has a solid SEO strategy to date and currently the site ranks VERY well for all of it's identified keywords. There is a well thought out site architecture and internal linking strategy currently. I know that generally adding external links can improve authority over time if they are relevant, authoritative sites, and done in moderation. To me, the biggest concern is that we are going from linking to the actual businesses from individual pages to having more of an overall listing page that links to 7 other "directory" sites. Also, I don't know how Google will interpret a website that only links to 7 other websites (I should mention that we are already currently linking to those 7 - before this proposed change - in many places across the website). I have already mentioned to the client if we move forward, we will be implementing nofollows on the links.

[AlanMosley]

do you have any evidence that linking out can improve domain authority, I don't think it can.,

Matt cuts once said that it can be beneficial to link out, well of cause it can, but can it make you rank higher?

The evidence shows it can make you rank lower, not higher