I totally disagree on this one. outbound links do not affect your rankings. This is a myth. Prove me wrong. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915 Please read this article to help you about this one. Here's one part of the article. Do outbound links improve your ranking? No. This is a myth.
Hi all, According to me i think the idea of outbound links are very risky kind of because if you have good links on your link page (Keyword Specific and PR specified), helpful for the users/visitors than obviously it will effect your ranking positively as outbound link is also the main factor for your ranking but unfortunately if you approach to bad sites (Not Relevant and PR 0) than it will not help you rather it will make you down in SERP. Let me explain my point with an example: If i have a site of Automobiles and i have 20-30 outbound links on my link page of automobile industry which have PR value 3-4, than it will be beneficial for me but if i have links like dating, pet care, health on my link page than obviously it will be of no use? Isn't? Moreover one more risk which involves is if 1-2 outbound links get penalised due to some reason than it will also effect your site. So always approach to good sites. Hope it will help you out, Thanks & Regards,
Baloney. It's a myth and an easy one to understand. If they actually had any value everyone would do it and thus it would have no real value in a search engine's algorithm. It's too easy to manipulate and the links in no way indicate the actual quality of the content on the page. And "look like an authority"? There are lots of ways that can be accomplished that are outside the control of the webmaster to do that (and are already being used by the search engines). People who believe this myth only hurt their own sites and help the sites they link to.
Everybody does do it. You show me a real authority site that doesn't link out to some other good sites. Nobody is manipulating the search engines. The search engines want to show content in the serps that is genuinly useful to its users. If that conten has an article with some links to other related resource then thats exactly what the search engines want to see.
If everyone does do it then how can it have any value? And an authority site is a site that has a lot of incoming links to it because it contains quality content. Not because it links to other sites about the same content. The search engines want pages that have content relevant to the user's query. Not links to the content relevant to the user's query. The search engines can just link to those pages themselves and would rank them higher in the SERPs if they were more relevant.
Relevant links are important to search engines, which is why anchor text is so important. Any keywords that are in the anchor text (or URLs) are weighted heavier than those in the body of the text. My view is this: maybe outbound links do help, maybe they don't; there is clearly a huge divide over this. However, there is no good reason why you should not have outbound links. The benefit is uncertain, but there definately is no harm in having them. There is no such thing as PR leak. You need to have some outbound links, just don't waste too much time and effort trying to optimise them. Cryo.
For incoming links. Not outgoing links. You're right about providing outbound links if they are relevant. Not doing so because you are worried about SEO is silly. But there is such a thing as PR leak. It only matters if you care about it though. And you don't need to have outbound links. It's quite a statement to say a page isn't relevant if it doesn't have outbound links. What about an article? Or blog post? Do they have to link to an external site to rank well or be relevant? Can't they be what the other sites are linking to?
I have yet to see anyone post anything to support an argument in either direction. Content is king. Take care of your readers. Provide quality content and links where applicable. Your readers will appreciate you for it and visit again in the future. SE's are developed with the user in mind. SE's don't want someone to search for one thing only to have something completely useless returned as the result. They want for their users to find what the are looking for. The WWW was founded and gained popularity as the information superhighway. Keep that in mind and your PR will follow. Of course this is just my opinion and I have no facts to back it up. But I think the principals are sound. Mike
outbound links pass PR; hence its clear it effects SEO hugely. Usually serps drop a website when ol's are higher than bl's.