You are considering to add a resources section to your site that would be truly useful for your visitors. It will include an alphabetical listing of your recommended resources and will likely end up containing hundreds if not thousands useful links. But, you are concerned that this might be viewed by the search engines as a link directory and that your site might be penalized for it. Should you be worried about this? Is a resources section going to hurt or help your site?
Here’s the bottom line… If it’s truly useful to your visitors, do it! Your visitors are likely going to link to it on their own. This by itself should remedy any potential problems.
The only issue you need to resolve is that of PageRank bleed. Since most of your resources pages will contain multiple outgoing links to different sites all over the Internet, you would do good to nofollow them.
A frequently referenced repository of useful links with minimum PageRank bleed is very likely going to be very beneficial for your SEO efforts. But, would it help your bottom line?
Indirectly… yes. More pages equal more PR. More PR equals higher rankings. Higher rankings equal more traffic. More traffic equals more revenue.
Directly… it depends. You will need to find a way to monetize the traffic to your directory. Either charge a listing fee (once it becomes a sought-after resource), offer advertising/sponsorship space to business who want more exposure, charge for guaranteed placement, or figure out how to convert the traffic into your main-site customers. Realize that lots of your newly-generated visitors will arrive via a long-tail search directly to the your directory listings. How are you going to monetize them?
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