Effectiveness of outbound links

Are outbound links an effective SEO technique?

[seowizz]

I have implemented a test on my site <snip> to analyse the effectiveness of anchored outbound links and to see the effects on ranking.

I really wanted to find out what the general opinion was on outbound link effectiveness?

[edited by: Webwork at 12:06 am (utc) on Feb. 4, 2009]
[edit reason] Per WebmasterWorld TOS please do not mention your website(s) [/edit]

[Shaddows]

If you go crazy, it can be detrimental, and in the long run you are causing yourself a lot of work in monitoring link rot.

That said, well crafted anchor text, linking to a page that is relavent to the text and to the host page definately works, at least for internal links. I have been annoyed by the unexpected promotion of PageA over PageB when I put in an inline link from A to B, which intuitively should have made PageB stronger.

I imagine it will have a similar boost on external links, but it's a bit noisy to detect (if it wasn't a link, its still a keyword incidence)

[seowizz]

Of course link rot.

I guess any external links you plant will have to be organised in order to keep monitoring effectiveness.