Over at Sitepoint forums, Aspen (a very well-respected and knowledgable member of their community) disagrees with me on whether outbound links on a web page can affect your rankings at the search engines.

My views:

"I believe that search engines use outbound links like any other type of on-page content to help determine things like "trust", "quality" and "authority". It may not provide a large boost, but by linking to high quality sites that are relevant to your page topics, you're showing search engines (and visitors) that you take the quality of your own pages seriously and are linking with care and intent (rather than for advertising or link exchange purposes)."

"If a page on the topic of spiders links to a scientific american article on cave spiders, the wikipedia entry on spiders and a page on what spiders eat, and another page on "spiders" links to Google's "spider" data, information about web crawling, etc. - you are going to see the SEs recognize the relevance of the outgoing links as making the page about one subject or another."

His points:

Thats like saying by using meta tags you're showing that your pages are of high quality. Outgoing links are meaningless in this regard. Anyone can add them, regardless of the quality of their site, and they do not automatically add to the quality of their site.

No one has ever been able to prove that outgoing links help your site. This myth is a result of conjecture, opinion, and the illogical karmic belief that some webmasters have whereby the Internet is some utopic society where what goes around comes around.

Now, let's find out how the visitors at SEOmoz feel... comments?