SEO effect of “You are leaving this site” page for outbound links?

Question

The problem

I am working on an aggregation website that collects reviews about specific products from various websites. The site has many thousands of outbound links (with "nofollow" attributes) to the content source websites where the reviews were collected from.

The site has far more outbound links than inbound links and I have read that this is bad for SEO.

The question

Would adding an intermediate «You are leaving this site» disclaimer/warning page like this hurt search engine rankings?

And can you provide any links about this topic?

p.s. The exit page would be a POST form instead of a script, that notifies the user that he/she is leaving this site and provides a button to continue to the other website.

p.p.s This kind of idea is implemented on many forums, aggregation websites with the purpose of warning the user that he/she is leaving this site and to block search engine bots from following those links because search bots do not submit forms.

Answer 1

Actually when you link to authoritive websites it does help you a little. For example if you are a used car dealer and you link to the manufacturers website that counts as you linking to someone more authoritive than you.

Websites which have you land on a page notifying you that you're leaving tend to do this for security reasons. Mostly to disclaim that once you have left any information you see on the web is not from their website. It's kind of ridiculous if you ask me and serves no purpose. You can just as easily set nofollow on external links of your choice as you can redirecting visitors which is something I personally hate having to deal with. Just let me leave your site.

Answer 2

Currently each of your outgoing links is a vote for the target page, unless you add a rel=nofollow to the link. You did that. If a referenced site gets punished it should not harm you.

If you now place all outgoing links to a intermediate page you should keep the rel=nofollow to that page in order to not push the "importance" of that exit page as it will receive lots of lots of internal links. On the page level you could add a NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW META tag as it is a true exit page. You can also place the page in a directory you disallow via robots.txt.

There are many legit sites that have a greater outbound versus inbound link ratio which is not bad per se. It's more about the ranking capability of a specific single page that has lots of outgoing (followed) links that might suffer.