I look after one site that is very successful and we have a good resource page. It has a good page rank of 6. Yes I know GPR isn't everything but it does give you an indication of how good our page is. Anyway someone requested a link to our site and turned down the offer off a link on our resources page stating: Sorry we are not interested in that arrangement because currently resource/links directory link and link pages have no value. If our links are placed in the content page our link will get good exposure and can benefit more. Now this gets me thinking is this true. Surely if we are both offering each other three way links this should make no difference. If there any advantage to a content link or a resource link. These links are free links. (The exposure bit is probably true depending on how popular that content page is.)
The value of the outbound links is diluted if it's just a page full of outbound links. After all, on a page with 1 outbound link, it's value is much greater, than having it's value divided by 10 or 100 (when you have 10 or 100 links on the page). Yes, give me a link on a content page any day instead of one on a 'links' page.