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Usually when you set up a website you want the best possible linking for it. Normally you don't have the luxury of being able to experiment, to compare what would happen if you tried something different. If you do try something different how can you see what the changes will be and are you willing to risk reducing its popularity?

For this reason I set up a some test blogs a couple of months ago. I was looking to see if the target="_blank" tag within the link had any effect. So for the first blog I linked to it from a few sites without the target command. For the second I used the target command and linked to it from exactly the same pages.

Then I started posting. For the first couple of weeks I thought that there weren't any differences. Maybe even at times the second site showed some advantages. I almost gave up and was about to use the blogs to test for something else. But after about a month there were big differences.

The first site is cached weekly. The second has less posts cached and only a few of the posts are cahced in any one week - some haven't been cached for 4 weeks or more.

So if the second blog isn't been cached as often, and apparently just because the link includes target="_blank", what does this mean?

For a start, it means that search engines aren't picking up changes as well. They therefore are showing less interest in the site. Less interest means less popularity. Just because of a small piece of code, a piece of code that seems completely harmless, Google would appear to be far less interested in the site than in a very similar site in which the link would open in the main window.

So does this affect you? Take a look at how many of your recent link exchanges use this 'harmless' piece of code. I would expect that most of your links out do.

To be honest, why do we open links in a new window? If someone is browsing our link exchanges and wants to visit a site they can easily decide to open the link in a new window. It's a sign of a lack of faith in the site we are linking to. And maybe this is something the search engines have picked up on.

So let's stop including target="_blank" when it's not needed. It could help improve our search engine rankings. My sites certainly seems to be more popular when links in don't include it.

Keith Lunt runs several successful internet marketing sites. You can contact him through http://www.janric.co.uk or read his daily blog to follow the latest experiments.