We see a flood of articles suggesting that G and other SE are ignoring links from non themed pages/sites Do you have evidence ? counter examples ? Do you pay attention to themes ? My main criteria for a link exchange are: - Site should be clean and reasonably related to mine - Link page must have be cached by Google within the last 30 days - Link page should have less than 30 outbond links - Link page should be themed and be reasonably optimized for a keyphrase (<title>, <description>, <h1>, <strong>, significant amount of text and not a mere list of links...) - the link page theme should be relevant to my site - Page rank is not at the top of my list but I avoid PR zero (unless the site is brand new, well organized and will obviously get a PR at the next Google dance) What are your criteria for accepting a link exchange ?
I do unrelated trades and send them to my directory. If someone wants to trade links on my site it must be a similar one, and most important to me is how much traffic will he be able to send. Once your site grows you can start being very picky about who you trade links with.
My decision on linking is far more based on, will a person that has an interest in my site also be interested in the site I am linking to. If so then if the site has no indications that Google might consider it in a "Bad Neighborhood" then I will consider linking. If I'm not convinced about how Google will view the site but I still think it is relevant to my site, then I will add the nofollow attribute to the link. I have lists of hundreds of directories on my site as well as Article submission sites, Press release sites and some forums. These links are for my visitors use and I don't necessarily trust all of the sites so I add the nofollow if I am in doubt.