I read SEOroundtable on a daily basis and came across this post that asked if links that deploy a target=” _blank or similar code – opening up a new window pass PR or not and if so, does this diminish Page Rank.

At first I thought it was a joke, but people will think of literally anything when it comes to SEO- which is good. The obvious answer is no, it doesn’t have or should not have any negative impact at all. It’s pretty simple your opening up a new window, not sending the visitor to a dead link. A link is a link is a link – makes no matter.

I think most dev teams should force a new window to open up if the link takes the visitor off the site, that way your visitor still has your site in view. This was an interesting question, but as I always say, SEO is pretty logical and consistent – if it doesn’t make sense, it probably isn’t right.

By the way – I really wish we could all forget about PR and in particular sculpting, which Matt Cutts actually said, is such a waste (granted the guy works for Google, but still I think this advice is sound).