This schplurb from a SEO forum was in regard to the importance of having outgoing links on your page. I have noticed, and suspected that they help with positioning. There is just one problem to this line of thinking though. Reasoning on it, the search engines have gotten extremely smart over the years. Any such considertation, that involves a "technique" that a webmaster or site owner can do to their site directly, to manipulate positioning in the search engines, is likely going to have no or low effect on the relevance of the site. Once you start down this road you start wondering just how much "on site" elements have to do with positioning anyway. Well, the post below impressed me as a great balancer of all considerations.

Outgoing Links Now Very Important? -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "Google wants what Google has always wanted -- pages that provide some sort of usefulness to the people Google sends to them. Some of those will naturally have links out to other sites, some of those won't. Some will have H1 tags, some won't. Some will have keywords in the page, some will only have keywords in links pointing to the page. Some will have high PageRank, some will not.

Google looks at all different things, but it has to look at each individual page (and perhaps each site) and take it on its own merits.

The bottom line is that you should do what makes the most sense for your site and its own situation. If you want to link out to other sites because it's helpful to your visitors, then you should do it! If you don't think there will be any benefit to your visitors to link to other sites, then don't. Either way will only help or hurt you in so much as you do it just because you're trying to figure out what Google might like."