"target=_blank" - Good or Bad?

There must be mixed fillings and perceptions for the practice of linking out of your site in a new window. On one hand, it is good for the original site because their site window will still be opened even if users leave on to the link you provide. This is surely a nice way to retain your visitors within your site. However, does this kind of practice hurt your page rank or will search engines penalize for using such kind of practice of opening links in a new window? You don’t have to worry because they don’t care. Search Engines including Google don’t really care what you have in “target”. Their crawlers just ignore what’s inside the “target”. However, they do follow the link. So, you are pretty safe from SEO point of view for using “target=_blank” or whatever or using other methods to open links in a new window.

This doesn’t mean, you should standardize this way of opening links in a new window. In fact, I think you should only open new windows if you really need to. Otherwise, just don’t. From the user standpoint, it usually is annoying except for some reasons.