Recently someone posted a question on SEO Moz Q&A section regarding outgoing links from their website.
The question went like this:
Hello,
On my company’s website and blog, we frequently release news and updates regarding ourselves in reference to our clients. For example, if we recently completed a new project for a client, we will do a press writeup. In the past, we didn’t bother linking out to our client’s webpages.. and if there was ever a reason that we needed to we would always “nofollow” the link. Although it happens sometimes, we never expect to get a reciprocal link back from our clients.
So, my question is.. even though we may not recieve a reciprocal link, is it a good idea to link to our client’s webpages if they display trustworthy material (although ranking for different keywords and on a different topic)? Would we benefit, or would it be smarter to not link out at all?
The question is quite a common one that I hear from clients who have heard that linking out to external sources can harm their SEO performance, and I always advise them the same thing:
If you are linking to a reputable website and providing value to yours and their visitors then add the link and leave the nofollow off.
The benefits of the nofollow tag have been depreciated by Google in recent times, to the extent that it makes no difference to your website if you leave it off. In fact you may be helping your cause by linking to the reputable website.
Jane Copland put it well in her response:
Good sites only link to good sites. [...] . A good signal is better than a neutral one.
I couldn’t have put it better myself 
So what are your experiences? Do you add external links to your sites, and if so do you nofollow them?
This is kind of obvious as there would be no reason to link out from your website other than to give a visitor useful info. It’s simple – if you are not comfortable giving a link out then don’t do it.
I haven’t followed this pre-occupation with nofollow and page sculpting etc. at all – as I’ve never believed this worked. Why waste your time sculpting web pages for a metric which we don’t fully understand and by Google’s own measure is flawed?
There should be no reason to stop Google visiting all your web pages and if you wanted to stop Google et al from visiting certain folders use robots.txt instead.
From my perspective rather than trying to “push” Google through your web site spend the valuable time building some useful and unique content instead
Well said!
In addition to adding value to your visitors by pointing them to a valuable resource you also help yourself by bolstering the value of your clients website, which could help them gain better rankings and more clients themselves, thus increasing the possibility that this client will prosper and come back to you for more business.