Link site versus link farm

How dangerous is this?

[steveb]

I've recently been approached by two new sites. Both are grey on the toolbar. The entire point of both sites (which appear to be unrelated as one is Dutch/.dk and the other British/.uk) is, well, imagine they are called:

widgetlinks.com or widgetportal.com

The entire point of the site(s) is to accumulate all the truly valuable links on the topic of widget that exist. In one case, there is absolutely no other point to the site. It just seems to be someone's genuine effort to help anyone find anything to do with widget in one place. It's actually kinda cool in that way. The other is similar, except it does have about ten affiliate 120x60 buttons on it that could make the site money via clickthroughs.

Okay, so me linking to link farms is bad. But what about linking to a site whose point is to helpfully bring the 150 or really on-topic links into one place? Both these people seem very sincere and I'd be kind of a jerk to not give them a link, but of course I wouldn't link to them if I was going to make GoogleGuy po'ed. :)

Since they have so many links on one page I doubt I'd get any value at all from being linked from there, but I really would like to be nice and give them a link. But (no joke) I can't sleep because I'm wondering if linking to them will get me a penalty. (If their bar ever is white I'll drop them instantly.)

So, I'm wondering if anybody has experience with such a site -- a "good" all links page? Also, if anybody has a link to the most in-depth thing that Google has published on this topic I'd appreciate it.

[bluemi]

I don't think there is any problem here, it just sounds like kind of a directory. There would only be a problem if there was heavy interlinking between all sites listed on these pages.