Links from a page are very important to it’s rankings, if you want a SERP like Search Engine Rankings the best web pages you can link to from the page that targets this SERP should be about Search Engine Rankings and the anchor text should include the SERP or similar derivative. A derivative phrase might be “Google Rankings” or “Top 10 Search Engine Rankings” all that matters is some of the anchor text uses some/all of the same words as the main SERPs.
So you’d ideally link to the top resources on the subject matter using relevant keyword rich anchor text. Those resources can be on external sites or on the same site, both help.
Now if you add a lot of unrelated links from a page (the anchor text isn’t relevant) you water down the optimization of the outbound links anchor text, you are telling search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN etc… that this page is also about these unrelated subjects and this means your important SERPs won’t receive maximum benefit from related outbound links anchor text.
This isn’t a penalty, more of you not taking full advantage of the fact anchor text of outbound links is important.
A general rule of thumb should be avoid too many unrelated links from a page or at least balance them with more related links, so the main SERPs story from the outbound anchor text reads main SERP not SERPs lucky dip :-)
I try to keep the number of unrelated links to below 5, but there are always exceptions.
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