Given the penalty for a link to another site is x, does the penalty
become MORE THAN x (say =R) if the other site links back ie there is a
matched pair of reciprocal links ?
ie 
is R > y-x    where y is the credit due to being linked to by the
other site ?

Thanks,Slogging

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Request for Question Clarification by mcfly-ga on 05 Jun 2003 09:03 PDT

Hi Slogging,

As independent contractors, Google Answers Researchers do not have
access to such details of the PageRank algorithm.  There is much
speculation regarding the whole field of search engine optimization,
and many differences in opinion to.  Personally, I have never had any
problems with being penalized for excessive outgoing links so long as
the site has other high quality content.

Regards,

mcfly-ga

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Clarification of Question by slogging-ga on 10 Jun 2003 08:10 PDT

Dear Mr McFly,

Thanks for your "request for clarification" and comment.The practical
information you have given in your comment is very useful and I am
almost ready to close and rate the answer.If you like you could think
about the following:

The word "reciprocal" means some type of "matching".What I am trying
to get at is whether there is any evidence that Google actually does
this type of matching and penalizes both sites for finding matched
pairs of links.Computationally this would probably require a lot of
processing complexity and capacity for google to do.Anyway I do
appreciate we are not privy to this sort of information from Google so
we can leave it that if you have no additional thoughts on this (you
dont have to be right)

Regards,Slogging.

Slogging,

Google Guy, a claimed Google employee, writing to the WebmasterWorld
forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/9967.htm?highlight=link+limit+google)
says:

"100 links is a good soft limit, but 100K is a hard limit. All pages
should be shorter than that"

ie.  you will not be penalized at all for having lots of links on a
page, up to roughly 100.

Hope this reassures you,

mcfly-ga