Sorry if this is in the wrong section, but I was wondering whether or not it matters where the link(directed to your site) is a site IE: Does this make a different (Home Page of a website) - Has a link to your website (Separate page solely for links) - has a link to your website Obviously in terms of traffic the homepage link is better, but does google look at them differently?
Yes, Google sees them as different. One is a page full of outbound links. The other is a page full of content with a few outbound links. If you're doing link exchanges you should both be putting links in the same place. One person giving a homepage link while the other person gives a links page links would be an unfair set up.
Thanks for the answer. I figured that as much but I was curious if anything had changed. Does google penalize you for having a page with a lot of outbound links?
They may or may not. But it devalues the page greatly. Normally the PR on your Home page is going to be much higher, thus making the link more valuable.
It is true that the home page has a higher page value; however, there is another way of looking at this. If you want to build your brand, the link to the first page may not do the trick. Consider anchor text within a link that almost always says something about the name of your company/site. What if this text should really be about a particular service you offer or about expertise that you possess. Having a link back to your site with an anchor text about your expertise holds, arguably, greater merit than just a link back to your site as the latter does not put any context to the link. Go to Google Webmaster and see how your links are registered. They're smart enough to know that your info is being picked all over the place. Take Wikipedia as an example. They have a page rank of 9/10. How many links point to the first page versus all the other pages?