I just signed up to linkmetro.com and am getting a steady flow of PR 0 sites requests. Their not banned by google, not adult/gambling and you can get to their link pages from the homepage. Their mostly unrelated but surely 1 crappy link is better then no link at all?
You have to start some where. Just make sure you are getting quality links that are relevant to your web site. PR is little more than a booy scout badge. It is not the end-all, be-all value of a website. Page rank is a flawed indicator. Google has a PageRank of 10 as well as Adobe.com. Even though Adobe is an extremely popular web site, it is highly doubtful that they have as many links pointing to them as Google does.
You put enough of these random links on your site and Google will think you're a link farm and penalize you.
But surley directory sites don't get penalized for doing this sort of thing. I was thinking of doing something like this sportsco.com/spglobal/otherlnk.htm Is their any magic number of unrelated links attached to your website that will get you penalized or should I just avoid unrelated links alltogether.
If you are in it for the long haul, you should only accept link exchanges from sites related to yours, or at least the title of the page your link is on should have your primary keywords in it. I stopped using Link Metro because the majority of the members use "Link Directories". Link directories are easily spotted by Google, and the seo community in general realizes that Google does not like link directories. Your links should appear "natural". Textlinkbrokers.com has an article posted that I think best explains how link building should be done http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blogs/comments/379_0_1_0_C/
There are a billion "directories" out there, and only a handful of them are in the search engines. The rest are buried so deep no one will ever find it.
Links on pages containing related text, such as a link within an article on an authority site with hugh "trust rank" is the best link you could get. Those links are obviously harder to get. Links on links pages currently still help with your ranking in both MSN and Yahoo. Links on links pages also seem to help increase your Page Rank slightly, which can help with attracting the more quality link partners later on. You do want to be careful with creating gigantic link directories, whereby you're linking out to thousands of sites without a link back. In my opinion, I would focus my main attention on getting quality links, and then hire someone to focus their energy on getting reciprocal links. This way you're getting the best of both worlds. Also, keep in mind that most people only focus on Google... when, in my opinion, it's also good to focus on what works in the other 2 major engines (MSN, and Yahoo).
Those are the words I live by. By the way, I wasn't slamming on Link Metro or anything Brad, just making an observation. Link Metro is responsible for a couple of my Adsense sites high rankings in MSN & Yahoo. I have considered doing "Article Swapping" in addition to link exchanges. Do you think that would work well with Google?
I think article swapping is the best way to exchange links. It's a relatively new idea but I think it is beginning to catch on. The only problem that may come from article swapping is duplicate content. You would be hosting a duplicate article on your site from a site that has already been indexed for that article & vice versa. I am trying to figure out a way around this. The only thing I can see is actually writing an original article & the site you link with writes an original article for you. This isn't practical at all ... any ideas?
If you don't mind sitting down and writing an article a day, it might not be so bad. I actually just set up a site (unable to put a link to it in the signature because I am a newbie) www.affiliate-exchange.net that has a section for people who want to swap articles. I haven't started advertising it yet, so the only exchanges available right now were put there by yours truly. But if you would be willing to give it a go and have a site related to affiliate or internet marketing or even seo, I would do it.