tedster - 4:42 pm on Mar 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

"No penalty" doesn't mean no effect on rankings, however. That's one reason why I dislike the common practice of calling every ranking drop a penalty - it just muddies the water. Google spokespeople are very precise in their use of the word "penalty".

If you add nofollow to every outbound link (and definitely I'd make that short list of exceptions for obvious quality sites) the most likely outcome would be no change, I think. If you have accumulated a LOT of bad neighborhood links over the years, you might see a small improvement.

I don't see a lot of risk here - but of course, every situation is different. 8,000 links at once is quite a change, no matter how subtle Google's use of outbound links may be as a ranking signal.