270 links on my home page is google penalizing me?

[krisidious]

270 links on my home page is google penalizing me?

on this SEO site http://www.rlrouse.com/find-quality-link-partners.html at the bottom of the page it says

"9 - Repeat this process until you have successfully completed at least 100 link exchanges with quality sites that share your theme. If you have over 100 links, split them up onto two or more links pages. You can even split the links up into categories if you wish."

also i read that i should not have more than 100 links on any given page...

is it not true that the deeper in my site a OBL is placed the less it helps that link partner?

alot of my link partners demand a link on my home page. should i demand the same for the best PR credit from google?

in the last few months i have added some 150 links to my home page but only 20% are reciprocating that link, and I have tripled my traffic from search engines... should i delete some of these links now? or has the new links boosted me above some other problem that has been holding my site down?

[cbp]

Google do recommend that you keep links to <100 per page from a users perspective.
Google do index and crawl more than 100 links per page and do not penalize for having more (GoogleGuy confirmed this on another forum).

More importantly - how does the page look? What do visitors think of all the links?

I would never give a link partner a link on the home page.

CBP

[krisidious]

the top competitor in my field has 190 links on there home page and fail the same meta tag analyzers that i do...