Here's a very interesting finding that seems to support the theory of "leakage" (but I don't know if that's really the best term for what I am about to describe).
One of my websites shows 356 backlinks on Google. I come up as #1 on about ten good search terms. My nearest competitor has 158 backlinks. However, another competitor came out of nowhere and went to #2 - and he only has 76 backlinks. Here's the clincher. He disabled the link on his homepage that used to point to his reciprocal links pages. He displayed a new location URL on his homepage, but it was NOT a hyperlink (therefore the search engines didn't crawl it). He stayed at #2 for about six weeks. Then he finally caught his mistake and made the link a hyperlink. Ten days later he dropped down to #12 after the next update.
Do the math. Show me two competing sites with an equal number of backlinks, and I'll bet that the one with fewer outbound links has a higher position on Google under the same search phrases.
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