Is it good to give links to relevant categories of big and famous shopping portal from a general directory under relevant categories? Will that be frowned by Google? - Anchor text will be contextual - Will be listed in relevant categories only - Around 100 links
Generally google doesn't worry about links going out of a website, its more important the links coming into a site. (unless you have a stupid number of outgoing links on a page) If you own a website and link to another site, providing your not linking to any dodgy sites and the pages being linked are relevant there is no real advantage or disadvantage.
The outgoing links from a site are the responsibility of the site owner and so could reasonably be penalised by a search engine. The inbound links could be provided by anybody, even a competitor aiming to discredit a site, so it would be more difficult for a search engine to use them in their rankings.
Which is why the review process is important for directories. If you're linking to everybody and continually accepting all websites, as too many directories do, big G will catch you out. We all know how they feel about link farms right?
True.. But Google state "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." - See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&topic=8524 So.. in some ways.. links coming into a site cannot hurt any website.. they just wont be given any positive credit.