I've read a few things that lead me to believe that a few outbound links to high quality related sites may help my own site's performance in SE's. Does anyone have an opinion on this approach?
from my understanding, high qualify outbound links might influence your SERP. This is due to the fact that if your website links to bad outbound links then google would think that your site might be bad too... please correct me if i'm wrong
I have heard that as well. In my blog posts, I use only 3 links and I always try to use one of them to a trusted, high pr site related to my post but not pointing to our main website. I'm not sure how much it helps, but I bet it doesn't hurt either , better to be safe than sorry.
Linking to Bad neighborhoods or sites which have been penalized by Google can bring you drastically down the SERPs. Having good outbound links HELPS IN NO WAY...If it did, all would have had links to 'Google.com', 'Facebook.com', 'Digg.com', etc.. and all such high PR, high valued sites.
They can certainly help your visitors! Keep them quality and hopefully the search engines will understand that you are keeping your visitors in mind. I wouldn't put too many links on each page as this seems to discredit pages sometimes, making them look spammy, especially unrelated links or affiliate links.
I do agree with your opinion. Blogs or sites with too many unrelated links are much more likely to be punished by the search engine.
yes; i really believe that outbound links help, i know it's not a very usual SEO strategy but each time that i launch a new site, the first thing that i do is linking to my top 3 competitors from a resources page, most people don't do it, most clients are surprised when i mention it, but i believe it has an impact on rankings.
dont think they do help, but in a way it would make sense. if you link to related sites it tells the SE's what your site is about.
Yes, that is true. I had a blog, I had got about 4-5 outbound links to some high quality article directories, That brings me PR4. Apart from that I have done only regular content updates.
I think it can help a little. If you link to a couple of HIGH QUALITY, sites that Google considers and authority on the subject, then it lends you a little more credibility. Conversely, if you link to what Google considers 'bad neighborhoods', or non-related sites, then it can adversely affect your SERPS.
It's amazing, I just heard about it. logically, if a high quality website link to us, then google will mark our website as a trusted website.
I don't believe that linking to good resources can boost your PR. pagerank from google has its own algorithm but thinking that linking to authority sites for increasing the PR will be a wildest idea. Definitely linking to good and related information will help SE understand about your content and site. Do link out very often, how can it be possible that end of all resources is your own site no one else in WWW, it can be a factor in SE ranking but will never be a major factor though.