sundaridevi - 12:57 am on Nov 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

Folks are suggesting that outbound links can increase your rankings in the serps.

I've heard this too, and would like to see some confirmation of it in practice or in theory. There's nothing in any technical literature that suggests that outlinking can increase page rank. It could, in practice be a factor that google ads in to the mix, something like a "good citizen" factor.

But I have two websites with less than 5 links on the "resources page" and for one maybe 10 total outbound links spread across the site that do very well and rank number one for many competitive terms. Also it may be worth noting that on all my sites the link page is green listed on the toolbar. So maybe that is a factor? If you are green-listed you are still in the optimal range? Does that make sense?

I remember reading quite some time ago, Matt Cutts saying that sites with no outbound links are not optimal. Not optimal just means they can improve, but my results show that the level of improvement may only be marginal. For sure nobody is going to argue that sites with 100 outbound links per page optimal but what then is the "optimal" number?

So I'd like to hear where this rumor comes from.