I'm curious if anyone has any tips for deciding whether or not to trade with a site. I'm looking for ways beyond PR and google's 'link' operator. I know to look for good content and not an excessive amount of outbound links, but sometimes i find myself completely unsure if a link trade will be beneficial
A simple method, copy your competitions backlinks where possible. Use the "linkdomain:" search operator on Yahoo! to view all the backlinks of the top 20-30 competitors and try to copy them where possible. Just search on Yahoo! yourdomain:www.competitorsite.com this is a good way to find what they've done.
check if you are getting a direct link to your site that is, it is not a redirect link, check if the page is not blocked from search engines through robots.txt...