Do Outbound Links Help SERP Rankings? What about rel="NOFOLLOW"?

outbound links google serp rankings nofollow

[MikeSchinkel]

I have two related questions so I am going to post them as two seperate questions in two different forums. Both involve an advertiser requesting that I change my site.

First, let me describe my site. We publish "guides" in print, PDF, and HTML format that help people select components and tools for .NET/ASP.NET development. We've published four guides to date with another nine scheduled and then a lot more planned after that. The site is relatively new but we've already got PR5 for two of the four guides including the one the advertiser is questioning (PR4 for the other two and PR5 for the home page.)

Currently the HTML for each guide is all on one page (though I plan to slice them up into lots of little pages) and the HTML page includes outbound links to the vendors and products covered in the guide.

Here is one of the two questions: I've seen anecdotal evidence that Google ranks a page highly in the search engine results when the page has lots of quality outbound links that support the topic and content of the page. My advertiser is asking that we include "nofollow" on the links to the non-advertiser's websites.

Ignoring any opinions about if his request is appropriate (that is the subject of the other question), do you think adding nofollow to these links could reduce my SERP rankings?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on the matter.