I have a website that has tutorials for several programming languages. At the end of every "lesson" of a tutorial I have a link at the bottom that says you can check link_to_some_website for more information. Recently I've heard that links to other websites are actually bad for your rating. What if the link is to a web page that is very similar to your web page? Do you think I should loose the links?
Keep them. They are good for your users and won't hurt you unless they link to the proverbial bad neighborhood. Bad neighborhood are rather like strangers kids are not supposed to talk to. Webmasters know not to link to them we just are not 100% sure we would recognize one when we see it. Shannon
That's another myth. It isn't true at all - pure nonsense. Smyrl is correct: If they are relevant to your site and helpful to your visitors, keep them.
After reading the thread I realized that google and other sort of ranking stuff made us robots who care about PR and traffic only. What happened to the times we made websites just to help somebody or put some good content and links? We now care about keywords in our metatags, backlinks and income on adsense only. Internet has grown to become a market and one more place to make money from worldwide reference... sorry. If the links are relevant I would left them. $)
I agree if those links are relevant and helpful to your visitors why have second thoughts of keeping them. Websites are made for a reason and one of them is giving information to our visitors. Good luck