i'd say, in general, a home page link is always better than links from a subpage. but if you take into consideration the relevance of the content in the page linking to your site, you may decide to take a link from a subpage if the subpage has quality content and is very related to your url.
I am referring more to me exchanging deep links from my site with other sites: example instead of a straight home page link, (http://www.dogflu.ca) I'd offer a deep link from my site, (http://www.dogflu.ca/dogs/dog_news
I have previous to this done little to no deep link building, only performing link exchanges and buying links to point to my home page.. Is there any soryt of penalty from google towards sites that have to many links pointing to one url?
I would never say "instead of"! In addition to regular home page links, deep links are an important part of getting the internal goodness of your website exposed to search engines.
No, as long as they are coming from sites that are not dodgy. I think the inner page exchange is good interms of boosting your search ranking because it allows to build with anchor text for the particular page - it also give the whole domain a boost and not just that particular pages, especially if many inner pages exchanges are carried out.
Right - links to inner pages help to create more focused and more relevant links. Ain't that the whole idea of hyperlinks?
link to your inner pages as well as your home page. a site that only has links to there home page doesnt look as "authoritative" as a site that has links to inner pages as well as the home page
deep linking is good because you have the chance of boosting ranks for internal pages and also to increase your home page PR by increasing your inner pages PR .
Deep links also look more natural to a search engine. If all the links are too the home paged, it might look a little suspicious.