I responded "I don't care" since that is the general philosophy that I follow. Almost always when we link out we are doing so because we have made a decision that we want to, and the decision is not related to whether there is an inbound link. The decision is related either to establishing cordial relationships or to helping visitors on our sites.
For example, it the case of the GPWA we provide links to top participants each month on the GPWA home page as a way of saying thank you. Doing something to say thanks to others when you mean it is just part of having a cordial relationship and not something that should have any strings attached. To be honest, the thought of attaching any strings never crossed my mind. In fact, the very idea of thinking that way in that particular context feels completely obnoxious to me.
For another example on the GPWA site, in our member directory we have direct links from each member's page to the member's portal sites. In that case we are primarily trying to help user's of the directory get to member sites. Again, link exchanges were not on our mind. Our focus was on being helpful to site visitors. We also wanted to provide links to member sites hoping that would be good for our members in terms of Google rankings. However, I doubt that doing so has any significant negative effect on the ranking of the GPWA site. My personal guess is the outbound links probably help establish the GPWA site as an authority site which would help both the GPWA and our members.
Michael
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