I have 3 pages (in sig) that link to a bunch of sites. They link to free testing resources. These links are hard to find, so people come to my site to use these links and resources. While there are no more than, say, 40 per page, it adds up to quite a bit. They are all 1-way links. How much does Google penalize this? If I made them all no-follow (which, if i'm not mistaken, would be a hell of a lot of work) would it improve my situation?
Can you spread them over content pages? Like footnotes? Not all the same on every page of course... I do not think that a lot of links are a very big problem, if it are genuine resources. Have a look at Wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization I always use that as a model. They are not owned by google, but do rank well. They kind of started the whole 'internal links in content' thing, which is totally the way to go. But besides that they have quite a list of references at the bottom of each page. I do not see them getting penelized, because this is the way a genuine report is build up.
That's a good idea, and I'd like to do that, but if I wrote a paragraph on each link, I'd have a page that took a few minutes to load I did that for my SAT page since it has fewer links. Still it doesn't statistically better on the rankings.
SEOSue has a good point and your outbound links are nofollow so I do not think you will get penalized.
You want to avoid too many outbound links on any given page.. i think someone threw in the figure of 100 being the limit that is acceptable....