Yes, or more precisely, good outbound links counts on your favor. I've never heard of a site being "penalized" for not having links, but I'm sure having good links is good for the website (and also, having bad links is bad to your website).
At one time, I thought that outbound links actually drained your PageRank juice. I also seem to recall IBM research coming up with an algorithm that ranked sites as either authorities or hubs, and gave a different kind of positive ranking to sites that did a good job of being hubs for a given search term or terms.
The HITS algorithm that you are talking about isn't used much because it is quite easy to game the rankings. There are some partial fixes to it. If I remember correctly the search engine Teoma was using a variant of hits.
I believe that my portfolio page is evidence of this, I can't think of any other reason why it'd have such a high pagerank (4). I don't think there are any offsite links pointing to it. (It has the same pr as my homepage and service page, both of which have numerous incoming links.)
If your homepage and your portfolio page are on the same site and on the same url directory, then it could be an artifact of the block rank approximation to Pagerank.
Since Pagerank is an expensive computation, one effective optimization/approximation is to cluster pages into groups and then compute the Pagerank per group. The group-scores are then re-distributed.
I am not sure whether this is what is going on, but it is a possibility.
You might be right. Checking now, every page I have at that top-level directory is either not ranked (effectively 0) or also a 4.
Edit: just found one that is a 3, but it has a trailing slash while the others don't (so it might be considered a directory and computed seperately.)
It also just occurred to me that my xml sitemap assigns a priority to each page, and the ones with a PR of 4 are the ones with a 0.8 priority or higher. There's another top-level page with a 0.5, but it has a trailing slash, and it's a wordpress blog so it has it's own sitemap. So I think that 4 might be independently calculated.
Not trying to toot my own horn, but you might find the bookmarklett on this page useful, it certainly made things much easier for me: http://nfriedly.com/pagerank
Is there a reason why you are sure that out-links are rewarded ? I have not encountered anything which demonstrates that. So I really would like to know.
