Does link exchanges help PR and seo?

[zeruel]

Originally Posted by ~kev~

Excessive reciprocal links can have a negative impact on your ranking in search engine results pages.

Link exchange is not that bad. As long as you don't use it to the extent. The guideline said that EXCESSIVE reciprocal links can have a negative impact. So the best thing to do here is to limit your link partners per page. And of course must be on the same niche.

[fromthe5]

I can say it can also help but be sure to link exchange to those site which has same pr as your site.

Generally that's what most people want to do, but there are situations where I might well trade if my page was a higher PR than the other side, and the possibility of some qualified traffic presented itself. I look at relevancy more than PR and it's always served me well.

[rarca]

For anyone who wants to know the answer to this question I refer you to http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1171

In short Google says

Google’s page on Link Schemes warns site owners that some kinds of linking might impact the ratings of their web sites negatively

and Yahoo says

stuff they don’t want included in their search engine is Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity (link schemes)

[lloyd.velarde@gmail.]

link exchange really do help to gain PR, as long as the link you will get is relevant to your site, link exchange is a helpful way to gather quality backlinks.

[Journey]

It can also be a good source of traffic provided that they are relevant to your site's theme.

[fromthe5]

link exchange really do help to gain PR, as long as the link you will get is relevant to your site, link exchange is a helpful way to gather quality backlinks.

Actually the amount of PR passed from a link pointing to your page remains constant regardless of whether or not the linking page is relevant to your page. From a SERPS standpoint if someone points a PR2 link with targeted link text to your page from a non-relevant page, you wouldn't get as much ranking power as one that was relevant to your page, but you would get the same amount of PR passed either way. There seems to be a bit of confusion in this forum in terms of understanding the difference between PR and rankings.