Definately NO. It wouldnt help If outbound link can help, everyone just add link to google, yahoo and those high PR site to get high PR.
lifeplayer, the question is about SERPS not PR. i think no one is suggesting you get better PR by linking out out. The suggestion is that by linking out to related authority sites you might be able to improve your SERPS. So yes, perhaps you should link to google etc if they are very related to what your site is about. I (and a few others above) think it works to some degree and in some circumstances - if you have a links page linking to 50 different authority sites that won't help anything, but a couple of carefully chosen links in the content of a quality page can help.
No they clearly wouldn't link to Yahoo just because they have high PR. This discussion has moved to discussing whether the links improve relevance, Yahoo, Google etc for many sites would not improve the relevance. so relevant outbound links, in moderation appear to be beneficial for SERPS. I believe it as google say build the page for the user, so what good site would refuse to have relevant links to further information? I think this improves your content rating overall and a small but important increase in SERPS.
If you link to quality sites (with the same content) it does help. Ever since the nofollows came around I've been experimenting with link sculpting. At one point I had all nofollow links to any page not on my website. I then watched my serps. Then, I removed the nofollow from any site I linked to that was a pr 4 or better and I watched my serps jump for all keywords. I am a firm believer that google will be watching us all when it comes to nofollows because it could get out of hand. Think about it, if everyone nofollowed every link Google's entire algorithm would fail.
If out bound links help a site to improve it ranking, then people will start to put hundreds of links on their pages to sites like google, yahoo, msn etc etc in order to improve their rank. So it is not true that out bound links help to improve ranking.
Here is one experiment concerning outbound links and SEO that I found interesting, but I cannot vaulch for the site. Here is a quote: Here is the full experiment: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-case-study-outbound-links/ The link is not live, so cut and paste it in your broeser.
I think "hundreds of links" would draw a red flag. A reasonable amount of "quality" links, even just a few will help. Try it..you'll see.
if you observed the top pages of the SERP, all website ranking in number 1 have a link out to related websites. that's my observation so what does this tell us? hehehe
I think y'all should read up on Matt Cutts blog He's pretty straight forward about these issues and is happy to dispel false rumor. Top ranked sites generally have much more inbound than outbound and have considerable internal linking. Just my 2 cents