Do massive outbound links hurt the rankings? Not necessarily. Please note that it’s different from linking to bad neighbors in site-wide range.
Besides directories, digitalpoint forum has probably the most outbounds links, almost every member put four random links in their signatures, but this forum has very strong rankings. A few other webmaster forums are very strict on signature usage, and they didn’t out-rank DP although they were older. My member ID on DP is under 1000, have been watching this forum grow, I’m always amazed at its rankings.
I know this is not a good example, I wouldn’t draw such a conclusion with it either. I setup a blog for an active member on my forum two years ago. She doesn’t care about outbound links at all, she linked to many pages nearly in every blog post. I don’t like her writing from a webmaster’s point of view. But only one year later, the blog started to rank very well, also has site-links on Google.
This makes sense, as long as these links are not paid, these web pages give visitors more options for further read, isn’t it the way Internet worked before? Over the years, we have heard of too many bad stories of bad links and became over cautious.br /br /Time to change for me.