Link Exchanges: a Few Thoughts.

Link exchanges have been talked about, and written about, a great deal.

In something like a decade as a webmaster, I've exchanged links with other sites. But, with rare exceptions, only with sites that have content that's similar to mine, or which compliments it.

I see it as a win-win-win situation, where I benefit from traffic originating at the other site, the other site benefits from traffic originating at my end, and visitors to both sites profit from having links to content that they could reasonably be expected to find interesting.

There was a lengthy, and lively, discussion of link exchanges on BlogCatalog.com, "The Ugly Underbelly of Link Exchange Threads."

That's where I found these very useful links:

From Google's Webmaster Help Center:
Webmaster Guidelines ("Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.")
How Google crawls my site

(If you think that I'm partial to BlogCatalog.com, you're right. It's an online community with pretty good level of knowledge, and quite a few active members.)