Eliminating outbound links for long tail-targeting pages

[ilyaelbert]

I have a number of pages that rank on the 1st page for highly long tail phrases, despite the pages having outbound links to things like 'privacy policy' 'terms of use', make a payment, etc...all pages that can be accessed from the home page. Do you recommend I eliminate these administrative pages from the long tail-targeting pages, to reduce outbound page rank flow? Does anyone create a different breadcrumb navigation or remove one altogether for pages that are highly targeted to improve their rank?

[DavidKauzlaric]

I do not think it's much of an issue. I don't think footer links bleed that much. I would not worry about it, being perfectly honest. Why not ramp up a few more internal links to these pages or some external links?

[elephantseo]

Just to clarify, outbound page rank flow is to links off your site, not other internal pages. I would leave privacy & tos links but it is good to cross link to other pages on your site via related pages. Here is a good post on that: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

[ilyaelbert]

do you think linking to a page from related pages improves the likelihood it will be indexed?

[elephantseo]

Yes, when you link to a page that is not indexed from a page that is indexed it will help. The tricky part is getting the currently indexed page re-crawled so it picks up the link to the non indexed page.

A good tactic for getting the page recrawled is RSS such as linking to a page from a new blog post. Or tweet the URL to the page.