If I have a forum, do all forum link exchanges help my site? I can't figure out whether certain sites would help or hurt my PR..
I heard that you are penalized if you link back to sites that are not in your same site genre. also, do you get points for all PR backlinks or just those from the same genre of sites?
there are plenty of ways to build backlinks totaly free of cost so no reason for going after link enchanges. google wil discount links gained form link exchanges. in terms of pr, you get PR transfer every time you get a link from a PR page. PR and penalty are not related. even if you get backlinks from sites that are not relevant or from bad neighborhood sites, you wil get PR transfer. however, your SERP ranking will hurt so it is wise to build backlinks wisely.
If you want fast to increase your pagerank, you need some qualify BL. Try to get a backlink from PR5, PR6 site and once you managed to do your site PR2, start link building
But first, you need on-page optimization for your site. Those are the things that you can control yourself such as: tags, anchor text, contents. Then you can go ahead and do the off-page optimization steps (exchange links, networking, etc...)
Increased your Page Rank Just Built High Quality One way Back Links which has less number of Out Bound Links and high PR. you can do Link Exchange with your Relevant sites. should have to Increased your one way links with Article Submission Directory Submission Forum Posting Press Release Submission Free Classified Submission it's Improved your Page Rank when next update is came.
If you have lots of links from low PR websites it will take you forever to get a high PR yourself, if you have many high PR links pointing back to your website you will have a high PR. Please bear in mind that PR does not help you get ranked better, websites with a PR 0 can still rank number one on Google.
could affect but could also help. it depends on site you exchange with. but best way is one way exchange. for example: theirsite has link to your site but yoursitenumber2 has link to theirsite this is best way to exchange. but don't do a circle as well 1->2 2->3 3->1 that's bad as well