Benefit of Outlinking to Authority Sites?

[aristotle]

Does outlinking to relevant authority sites boost your own site's authority in Google's algo?

I've seen this mentioned as a possibility in various articles and posts, but don't recall seeing much discussion otherwise. I did create some of these outlinks on my own sites several years ago, but don't know for sure if it had any effect on their rankings. An obvious disadvantage is that it invites visitors to leave your site. Also if you outlink to competetors, it could help their rankings.

[Receptional Andy]

If there is an effect, then in my experience it is a small one.

There are three things worth separating, though. When you add an external link to a related site, you change the HTML of your page so that it now includes a link, that may well use relevant anchor text. This is an on-page change, separate from what the destination of the link is.

I'd say it's a desirable factor to have links on your page that use anchor text related to the content.

The other thing is you declare a relationship between your page and another one.

It may be that the value of the page you link to influences the value of your own page. I've seen this in extreme cases whereby the "wrong" link can have a negative effect, but I'm less certain about general cases. I don't think any effect is very large, if it exists.

The final factor is that you physically have a reference to an external URL from your page. While it's clearly a good thing for visitors and healthy for the web in general to have external links, I'm sceptical that this in itself is likely to help rankings.

And, of course, there may well be combinations of the above that create a greater cumulative effect than in isolation.