Vadim - 1:33 am on Sep 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

I had a kind of unintentional pure experiments that shows that outbound links may be important at least for PR.

It happened that due (probably) sloppy design the new part of my site lost PR. I redesigned it.

The page with good outbound links (and no inbound links) recovered first about 2 weeks later with PR2.

The whole new part of my site recovered only 2 month later and got in average PR4 (that had in average before drop)

The first recovered page still has PR2.

Bottom line, outbound links help but not as much as inbound ones. I believe that outbound links show Google that you are serious, are not a spammer and your page is related to the topic of outbound link.

They help to recover.

Vadim.