honestman - 9:35 pm on Feb 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thank you for the thoughtful responses.

I guess the core question is whether portals are penalized for being portals. If we have 50,000 outbound links to sites which we have checked out carefully and have at least 1,500 inbound links from largely high-value sites, is there a risk that by including more outbound links that site page PRs (which are high for many keywords as they should be) will drop?

Note: We do not engage in link exchanges as a general practice unless the exchange is based on a very valid content connection.

We hope that we will not be penalized for making more accessible new sites which have valuable information or that mini-portals in general are penalized as part of an honest attempt to make available valuable information in the form of external direct links.

It has been noted by us that many sites which use central "click-counting" redirects have a far higher ranking than would normally be expected based on their actual content.