internetheaven - 10:46 am on Sep 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

You are not alone, I have also heard this but not yet had the time to carry out a controlled experiment to prove one way or the other.

I've carried out controlled experiments on this. From my results I COULD say that it does boost your ranking - unfortunately, Google has so many unknown factors in its ranking algorithm I just don't know if it is something else that they are picking up on with my site.

My "feeling" from the results I saw compared with other factors i have been working with is that it does not matter (at present) which site you actually link to - just as long as your site is not a dead end. I "think" that this will have more to do with the big PageRank picture more than anything specific about ontopic outbounds.

Note: By controlled, I mean stripping the site of all other possible variable like increasing inbound links.