I just joined a link exchange program and found that most of the link requests I get are totally unrelated to my website. For example, my site's theme is education, and yet I am getting requests from gambling sites. I thought that irrelevant links hurt your site's ranking, so why am I getting so many such requests?
Because unrealated links do not hurt your site rankings. Its one of the rumors made fact on various SEO forums. However watch for bad sites and bad neighborhoods (such as adult, gambling, Rx).
Unrelated links are not counted or taken into consideration by search engines so they are not of any use and donot harm you but yes it is true bad neighbourhood can hurt your site that is links like gambling,viagra,adults etc.
False as well Unrelated links might have less influence in particular SERPS, but still give Pagerank, link value, etc. It helps.
There are different views on this topic. Some people just want a lots of links with little work on their part. That is what you find with most Link Exchange Programs. Personally, I would rather spend my time getting high quality links that will have a greater affect on rankings. This will also put the site in the right neighborhoods. Then again I work mostly with established sites or webmasters who are in this for the long-term. It would be a different story if I worked with Gambling, Adult or RX.
Just look at it this way. You have someone searching on the internet and is on a site for car parts. They dont find what they need and head to the links page. They find your site a nice purty flower shop. Whats the odds of them heading over to check out your floral arrangements? People say get relevant links because you get targeted traffic from your links. Dont get relevant links because either that sites traffic will never come to your site or if they do theres no chance of them using your service or purchasing your product. Yes a link is a link and can help you with your keyword ranking if you used proper anchor text. But part of putting links on your site should be to give your users more references on something relevant to what they are looking for. Not hey come look at my picinic baskets site and then all of a sudden, BAM!, muscal car photos all up in your face.
As far as getting traffic from your links on other sites, its true you may get one or two every rare once in a while, but that usally is not worth extra effort or time of attaining related links. Now for links on your site, to be honest link exchanges are a huge waste of time in the first place.
Try link-vault. It's a first class links exchange network restricted to pre-qualified sites. It works by a system called "vaultage" which is akin to Google's PR. Its only drawback is the little bit of coding which can be daunting for a newbie like me. Use my referral link to join. It's 100% free, but it will boost my own link vaultage, which means my links on more sites. Join here: link-vault.com/?ss=4118 PS: You specify the site category you want your links on, and the categories from which links are displayed on your site, giving you much more control than the typical link exchange. Remeber they only accept quality sites, and none of the usual questionables e.g. gambling/porn etc.