Can someone please tell me if linking with RELATIVE websites with no PR or low PR is beneficial?? I am sure it is BETTER to link to relative sites with HIGH PR, but I am a little confused about whether links to low PR are helpful. Thanks
Every link to your site is helpful. If it is free, get it. The degree of help with Google is (most likely) determined by factors such as PR, but all links help some, and with other search engines may help just as much as a high PR link.
I tend to agree with you, BUT why do so many people only accept high page rank links. As it is, all our HOME PAGES are PR4 or higher, but our link pages do not have a high PR. That tends to turn off many good, relative, high PR sites. But, I guess many low PR sites now grow up to be high PR sites.
Generally all links are helpfull. IMO it's more beneficial to get links from sites related to your site's theme, even if they have lower PR. Google likes when you have lots of links from different C class ips.
There are a lot of sites in very crowded markets with few incoming links and doing top 10 for their keywords. This is because they have few backlinks from high PR, related sites. This is the most succesfull way to rank well. Everybody is doing link exchanges with hundreds of PR0 sites. There's no point in doing this. If your site is original and well designed, once the word is out and ppl see it, they'll love linking to it. And YES! Content Is KING!
IMO all links are good but it is more beneficial to have link with a site relative to yours and sites havinng higher PR. Good luck....
Most natural way of receiving links without doing any SEO is that people link to you from ALL sorts of pages with ALL sorts of PR. Best kind of SEO is optimization in such a way it looks like no SEO has been done, therefore getting links from ALL sort of pages, including not so relevant and from ALL PR pages is a good thing. Make it look as natural as possible!