Marcia - 3:27 am on Oct 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

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

Outbound links may help with rankings, but PR is calculated according to inbound links.

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

PR is lost when inbound links are either lost or when the PR of the page or pages linking are decreased.

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

That PR2 isn't because of the outbound links. The PR2 comes from calculating the value of inbound links to the page.

It amazes me that people post that they are tired of seeing directories come up in the SERPs and then post that there is no evidence that outbound links can improve one's rankings.

Exactly. Outbound links may help a page's ranking, but that's a different matter from Page Rank, which depends on inbounds. WBF, does it seem to be helping just from linking out, or is anchor text used in the links?