Directory relevence

I recently took a job to manage a websites marketing and SEO, and I have a question I'm not sure about:

The website is niche based and has a niche directory. But, for some reason within the directory are links to Coca Cola, Discovery Channel and Daimler Chrysler and I'm sure there's a lot more.

My immediate feeling was it's probably not too good but then again may not hurt either. Is it worth it to remove them all?

 

Whenever G penalizes a website based on outbound links, its usually because of;

1. linking to a link farm
2. too many outbound links with less content on a page
3. too many irerevant outbound links on home page


If you have a total control of the site, I think I will remove irerevant links first. Especially if they are placed on home page.

 

The more Outgoing links you have on your site will depreciate the value of your site. Try to minimize it if you can't eliminate it.

 

Do you mind explaining why/how outgoing links depreciate the value of sites?

 

1. I'll be going through all the sites we link to using this command linkfromdomain:examplesite.com, to check for bad neighbourhoods and relevence, which is the main priority. Is there an easier way?

2. I'm also thinking about restructing the directory to include more unique content for each listing, but that would take a long time, so if anyone has any thoughts on this?

3. Not an issue

Its a niche portal site, so the directory mainly serves a relevent purpose. I'm not too worried linking to relevent sites, even if their not recipricol. Though someone new to SEO thought including some irrelevent reciprocal links was a good idea, and for some reason which I have yet to fully understand they included one way links to irrelevent sites (mainly big corporations).

Each page on your site is partially valued by the incoming and outgoing links. Put simply its incoming minus outgoing, but its not really this simple. I could probably write a few paragraphs on this but the basic idea is to try to keep outbound links to a minimum and keep them relevent.




Can anyone point me to any info on directory optimisation?

 

linkfromdomain:examplesite.com?

is that a valid command? If it is I've never seen it before

 

Sorry I forgot to mention its an MSN command http://terpstravaganza.blogspot.com/2006/10/microsofts-new-linkfromdomain-search.html