Should you exchange with people below your PR. E.g. should a pr3 exchange with a pr 1 or 2, or should the pr3 just exchange with pr3. Should it be +/- one?
Not always about PR, more about how related the content is. Honestly, link trades have been up and down for me over the years, some times they work, some times they don't. Best are one way links. You probably already know all this.
Never. I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with link exchanges. Google is not a big fan of reciprocal links and they won't help you much. Focus on one way backlinks which will give you a much better SERP results.
Focus on the traffic aspect. A good related niche site with good traffic has a great potential to send traffic to your site. That is worth much more than a higher or equal PR site with little traffic and non related. Build links for the benefit they will have on getting people to visit your site. PR is a bad focus for link building.
High PR backlinks will improve your SERP and bring more traffic indirectly. You're targeting some great keywords in your signature
That is questionable. PR plays very little in the SERPs. A quality PR1 link will have more affects on the SERPs than a crappy PR7 link. Thanks for the compliment on the signature but none of them are mine.
Yes, this works best. However, if you are doing a link exchange it is definitely ok to trade a PR3 link for a PR2 link if the site has more pages indexed then yours does. PR3 - 150 indexed pages traded for PR2 - 290 indexed pages The amount of pages counts as total backlinks / inlinks to your site.
I think it should be up to you. If you think it is beneficial for you to exchange with lower PR site, it should be okay.
Some people are still living in the dark ages... Here's what Google has to say about link exchanging: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356&query=link+exchange&topic=&type
If you have a celebrity blog, you would turn down a link from tmz or other biggies just cause google said no? Don't bother to agree, I understand if you are desperate to promote your sig....
the rank and the page rank are totally different terms.........it would be helpful if you exchange a link with PR3 site when you have a PR1 site............the PageRank goes in the way as starting from lower and increasing towards higher... PR0<PR1<PR2<.........<PR8<PR9<PR10 PR8 to PR10 are mostly owned by most popular websites like Microsoft etc.