I know for a 100% fact that linking to a bad/spammy site can hurt your rankings; in fact, this has been confirmed on numerous times by Google employees. It only makes since that the opposite is also true, that linking to a quality site can drastically help your rankings. Not only do I have great logic for making such a claim but I have also personally seen this to be true with my sites. Many experienced webmasters are afraid to link to a site unless they get a link in return and this is because they are afraid to give up "pagerank juice" although this may be true, you will be giving up one thing to gain another thing that I consider to be more important to pagerank thus HELPING your rankings. On numerous occasions Google has made it clear that webmaster's should not focus on link building, SEO, etc. and simply focus on providing customers with a quality resource. I personally believe that site helpfulness, value-added, and quality of content are MUCH more important than backlinks. There are many sites on the web that have millions of backlinks but are out ranked by sites with just a few backlinks.... The reason for this is the site with fewer backlinks actually provide a much better service. A QUALITY SITE will want to provide their visitors with the absolute best resources and tools, sometimes this means linking to another site of quality (even if it is a direct competitor). You will find that focusing on your customer's or visitor's overall experience you sales and rankings will increase. So don't be afraid to give a free link to a quality site in your niche; in fact, I think you will find that doing so will help your rankings increase in time. BTW... If you are looking for quality sites to link to, you can start with mine haha. Hope you find this information helpful!
If the above post make any sense to you, and you wanted to help your rankings! (HAH!) , feel free to send a PM to me! I have lots of sites for you to link to!
A well networked site needs both inbound as well as outbound links... and people do understand the need to link to good sites. They just do not emphasize more on it.. simply because linking to other sites is easy where as getting links from others is the difficult task and hence more focus on the same! Regards, RightMan
The outbound link to a trusted sources and positive seo effect is still a myth. However, I do believe personally it would help a little if you do selective enough. If your content is about "Widget" and you linking out to some authority website under "Widget" category, then it might be counted as useful referring and could increase a page score somehow.
There is no logic to support this argument. I'm not saying it's false, just that it's only speculation. Perhaps you're doing something else that's assisting you with your rankings and it has nothing to do with linking out to quality sites.
As Sxperm stated, this is a myth. What looks funny to google is if your site doesn't have any outgoing links - but to flat out say that "linking to a quality site can drastically help your rankings" well, it's just isn't true. Many times these falsehoods are started when a webmaster sees an increase in SERPS and then incorrectly credits something they did. The Google algorithm is constantly changing - it is tweaked hundreds of times per year, combine this with known helpful factors like domain/backlink age, it can be very easy to jump to false conclusions. If you have a link which will be of benefit to your visitors, then you shouldn't be afraid to include it - just don't expect "drastic" changes to your SERPS because of it.
I also think there is no logic to support the argument. According to what I know,google still haven't confirm it officially.