How many outgoing links on index page?

How many is to many?

[johnnstacy1]

How many outgoing links is acceptable anymore? Is it a percentage of the text on the page? It has been some time, but I remember hearing about a penalty whereas, if you had to many outgoing links, those pages would suffer a hit. Typically, outgoing links to me, equal a PR of one less than the source. When does this become degraded?

[GoogleGuy]

Hey, johnnstacy1, welcome to WebmasterWorld. In the original PageRank papers, the outward PageRank flow is divided by the number of outgoing links. So there's a sort of diminishing return if you have a ton of outlinks.

We also recommend that you keep the page size under 101K or so. That doesn't include external things like images or external CSS/JavaScript--just the actual content of the page.

[robotsdobetter]

No more than 100, that's what it says on a Google page. If I was you I would keep under 50 because it won't look to good to your visistors.

[MikeBeverley]

I'm sure I'll get a slap from Googleguy for saying this but:

"The more outgoing links on your main page, the less PageRank is distributed to the rest of your site."

This does not mean I promote 'PR Hoarding', but if you can try to spread the outgoing links around pages of your site. This is also good practice as Google does not like 'dead-end' pages so if each page on your site links out to 1-3 good external sites then you'll keep Googlebot happy and make sure you don't lose too much pagerank.
PageRank is not the be-all and end-all of ranking though, it means alot less than it used to but why give away something when it can be put to better use, eh?