Link exchanges and pagerank
Link exchanges can still be an effective way to gain inbound links to your site, but the method is changing.
In the most recent pagerank export many link pages had their pagerank removed and are now showing as a grey bar. Possibly they still count for passing pagerank and possibly not, but the fact is google are getting much better at identifying link pages, and if they can do that they can also ignore the links, either now or in the future.
Presumably it’s pretty easy for Google to spot site sections where all the pages have 10-40 neatly arranged links to other sites, with the destination site in careful anchor text at the beginning of each sentence. Typically the link section will have no incoming links from external sites, and may only be linked to internally from the footer of the site.
But still there remains an obsession with pagerank, and with link pages.
Our own sites are pretty successful, and I am pretty confident that we can conclude that a few, high quality links is preferable to lots of poor quality links. But high quality doesn’t mean high PR, it means ‘highly relevant’ and ‘in-content’. PageRank is a factor I suppose, although we tend to ignore it if a page is showing a ‘white’ rather than ‘grey’ toolbar PR.
But very often when we suggest a 3-way in content link-exchange with someone, even from one of our high traffic sites, if their page has a PR2 and ours has a PR1 or PR0, they will say no.
So the challenge is always to find people who are interested in quality links rather than pagerank. I can more or less guarantee that these are more effective than other links. Here are a couple of suggestions for choosing link exchange partners:
Do you like the site? Is it interesting?
Does the owner look as if they spend time and trouble on the site?
Would you visit the site yourself or would you immediately use the back arrow to escape?
Is it possible that the site would link to you naturally, if the whole ‘linking out is something to charge for’ scenario hadn’t come about?
Forget everything you think you have learned about link exchanges. You WANT links from low ranking pages, because they are a more natural link profile. You DO NOT WANT to obsess over anchor text - as long as you have a few links with correct anchor text, the rest can be more or less anything related, again because this is a more natural link profile.