How can I zip/compress a symlink?

You can store symlinks as symlinks (as opposed to a copy of the file/directory they point to) using the --symlinks parameter of the standard zip.

Assuming foo is a directory containing symlinks:

zip --symlinks -r foo.zip foo/

Rar equivalent:

rar a -ol foo.rar foo/

tar stores them as is by default.

tar czpvf foo.tgz foo/

Note that the symlink occupies almost no disk space by itself (just an inode). It's just a kind of pointer in the filesystem, as you probably know.

On RHEL 5, we have

$ zip -h
Copyright (C) 1990-2005 Info-ZIP
Type 'zip "-L"' for software license.
Zip 2.31 (March 8th 2005). Usage:
zip [-options] [-b path] [-t mmddyyyy] [-n suffixes] [zipfile list] [-xi list]
(snip)
  -y   store symbolic links as the link instead of the referenced file