I have never thought of spiders looking at outbounds... I have focussed on inbounds as a way to increase traffic & bring more people here from more places. ProBlogger thinks that quality outbounds probably reflect back on the blog from whence they come, which had never even crossed my mind, and makes me wonder whether wrapping all your outbounds in a blogroll & shrinking them to one line of code does you harm when the robots come....
For more about this, Google for "bad neighborhoods seo" without the quotes. It's thought that Google and the other SEs already evaluate a page's worth to some degree based on outbounds.
Google, by the way, seems to have an experimental spider that reads Javascript. Speculation is that this new spider parses Javascript to look for cloaking attempts, but it could also read the document.write() code to look for links.
For more about this, Google for "bad neighborhoods seo" without the quotes. It's thought that Google and the other SEs already evaluate a page's worth to some degree based on outbounds.
Google, by the way, seems to have an experimental spider that reads Javascript. Speculation is that this new spider parses Javascript to look for cloaking attempts, but it could also read the document.write() code to look for links.