Link Exchanges bad for PageRank?

[sherwood]

From what I've read today doing link exchanges with higher PR sites can possibly decrease your page rank. This is what I read:

• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

So would it be better for a site to have no Link Exchanges for my PR?

 

[Webestrian]

Yes,But Only if OVERdone!
Also avoid LE with sites having lower PR than your site

 

[Loget]

Without a shadow of a doubt its a bad thing, people assume Google won't pick up on it but its pretty obvious to the Google spider and I would imagine Google will trust you less, I think all link exchanges should be just for traffic and webmasters should use the "nofollow" tag too prevent sites you link to getting PR. Its one of the reasons why many sites in the scene wont go above a PR2-3 because Google has picked up on it. If your going to link exchange for pagerank you should do a 3 way link exchange much harder too pick up. You should focus on getting quality links your site and naturally your PR will go up you don't really need link exchanges they do more harm than good really. :P

 

[Curtis129]

Make your link exchanges seem gradual to SE's.
If they notice your domain registered 1 month, and you have 300 inbound links from PR1,2,3+ sites, they are going to be smelling fishy.
But link exchanging with websites the same content as your own, will only benefit.

 

[sherwood]

So say I used the rel="nofollow" code in the links google will not see it as a LE and they will not push down the PR?

 

[Loget]

If you use nofollow the sites you are linking too will not recieve some of your pagerank the link won't provide any SEO benefit for them the same goes for you if they link to you with nofollow it will be purely for traffic. You won't be suspected of link exchanging for PR by Google as well which will bring only benefits.

 

[Curtis129]

nofollow links essentially tell the crawler not to follow your ref..

 

[sherwood]

Okay cheers.

 

[vamp6x6x6x]

This is true my friend told me, also thats what makes most people not want to exchange links with a newbie, but me I do not mind one bit, for on my bllog I will let anyone submit their links despite their page ranking, etc. My site may never become the best page ranking one day, but I made it this way because I know how hard it is for people who are new to owning a site/blog/forum to do link exchange.