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Thanks.
If I were you I would create a mini directry and arange the sites you link to into categories. This will be a lot more user friendly that a list of links. It will also be a lot more SE friendly and will act as spider bait.
born2drv, you're not losing PR from your site by linking. It's on a page basis, and you don't lose PR from a page by linking out; that's determined by the total value of the "votes" cast for it.
What you're doing with linking out is reducing the amount of Page Rank that will be distributed back to other pages on your site from the links page or pages, so it's affecting the internal distribution of PR in that respect.
>is there no difference than say having 10 pages with 50 each?
What you won't want to do if they're links pages is spread all those links out onto your regular content pages.
How having 10 pages of links instead of 1 with 500 will affect your site depends, in one respect, on whether you'll be linking to all of the 10 pages from other pages on your site or not. Again, linking to 10 instead of 1 affects the internal PR distribution.
The number of links on the page will also determine the value of the vote you're giving the exterior pages you're linking to. For adding links some people won't exchange with you if you've got 100 links on a page if they'll be giving you back a link from a page with 10. It's not good math for them.
Another thing. If you're linking only to linkpage1.htm and then linkpage1.htm is linking in a chain type sequence to linkpage2.htm ... linkpage10.htm with only those links to the additional pages, the successive ones will have progressively lower Page Rank, and the value of the links to other sites from those pages will dramatically decrease.
I've seen sites do that, and the final links page had a value of PR1 or no PR not because of penalty, but because of the way they were structured. I've seen this over and over again. A linkpage3.htm with PR2 and 50 links on it, in addition to the links back into the site - will some people exchange links? Yes, unless they know better.
You're not giving much value with a page with 500 links, but you could have insite links lead to the first page (not all 10) and then have links from the first page to the other 9. At least it's distributing a share to the other 9, and there will still be links from 10 pages with 50 each to the outside sites rather than 500 from one. It depends somewhat on the PR of the first link page, but from the perspective of your site, linking to the first page only and then distributing among the other 9 would probably be better math.
Added:
I took a long time, was posting at the same time as mack. I think we're actually coming to the same conclusion. With separate pages, you can also add some value to them if they fall into different categories, adding some relevancy to the pages themselves.
The short answer to your question is that there will be no difference in the amount of total PR you send out of your site IF you do the following.
Setup a mini-directory of 10 pages with 50 links on them. Have an index page of all of the pages in the mini-directory. Link internally to the index page only of this directory just as you would have linked to your 500 link single page. Do not internally link to any of the 10 pages with 50 links on them from any other place in your site.
If your goal is to minimize the PR that you distribute out of your site, then pay attention to how you link to either the mini-directory index or the 500 link page. How you link to it internally affects how much internal PR you are sending it... and sending out.
PR flow is like waterpressure in a pipe. You can't send out anymore than the diameter of pipe will allow. Pay attention to how you link in, and you'll have control of the PR you send out.
