We always heard that forward links can hurt your site, on the other hand, many SEO experts believe that its not true. I am confused, who is right, does Google like forward links, or does not care. Thanks
I have always linked freely to quality sites offering information of use to my visitors. I have hundreds of top ten rankings for various search terms across my niche and extending into others. OBL's don't hurt. Anecdotally I would say they 'might' have a positive influence. On the other hand, Directories once ranked quite well in Google, but seem to have dropped out of favor. A Directory is really not much more than a page of OBL's
Outbound links generally do not hurt your rankings. In fact linking out to highly trusted domains is said to improve your domain trust. The one exception is if you have followed links on your site to sites that are blatently violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines and they get discovered and penalized, your site too could be penalized for promoting such a site. That's why God... err Google and the other engines... suggest using rel="nofollow" on outbound links where you are not willing to vouch for the trustworthiness of the domain being linked to.
Its not really the "outbound" links, but the quality of the sites you are linking to. Are you linking to sites that promote copyright infringement, or are you linking to government sits? In other words, try to link to sites that might be considered an "authority" on certain topics. Example - lets say you have a blog on health topics. You would want to link to sites like webMD, and not to some blog that promotes snake oil.