In practically every forum you see that it is important to have a proper link exchanges, have you been wandering what a proper link exchange is?
With a site like this a proper link exchange can be quality links from pretty much any site and as such they can link to me. Most site however require that they stick to sites in basically the same line as there content, though even with that there are some basic linking practices that need to be followed:
1. Do not link to link farms it will only degrade your site, what is a link farm? A link farm as far as I am concerned with is a site that has literally tens of thousands of links and only has a P3 ranking or less from GOOGLE and all of the link pages are Po, actually the only page with a rank is the main page.
2. Link only to sites that offer quality content and have similar or better page rank of your site, this will guarentee somewhat that your site will continue to improve in its rankings. Avoid linking to sites that do not provide a return link either from the site you linked to or another site in there group, linking from another site is always better as your rankings improve with more inbound links and lower with out bound link ( to outside your site ), lowering of your rankings will not occur unless you put 100's of outbound links on one page. Personally I try to keep the number of outbound links to 20 - 50 on one page.
3. There are some good scripts out there that will enable all linking to be automated that will hardly cost any money just type in your toolbar "Link exhange script". Cgi based scripts usually will not get ranked by GOOGLE though these pages are still ranked and get indexed, it really depends how long the page has been up.