Impact of number of outgoing links on Page Rank of an optimized page?

[thomaspro]

What is the current best practice on preferred number of outbound links on a page you are trying to rank with:

• According to online resources form a pure page rank perspective a high number of outbound follow links can have a negative impact not only on child pages but also the page itself
  http://pr.efactory.de/e-outbound-links.shtml

• Other resources suggest that particularly placing high quality outbound links on a page (nofollow) increases the trust and authority of a page

Are there any other elements to keep in mind? Is the best practice to avoid any follow links on a page you want to rank well in Google for?

Thanks /T

[TakeshiYoung]

Having many links on a page will not reduce the PageRank of the page that it's on.

However, it will reduce the amount of PageRank being passed to the individual links on the page, so you should try to keep the number as low as you can while maintaining a good user experience. A general rule of thumb is to keep the number of links to 100 or less, although many ecommerce sites have many more (the typical Amazon.com page has 400+ links).

Linking to high-quality, relevant external sites is believed to improve the relevancy of your own page. These should not be nofollowed. In general, it should not be necessary to use nofollow for external links unless you are linking to a direct competitor (but then, why would you be linking to them?) or in the case of UGC where people may leave links to low quality sites.

In general, just use your common sense and link to any relevant internal or external pages that you think will enhance the value of your content. Don't use nofollow. It's good to use target="_blank" to have external links open in a new window.