From what I read, link exchanges have not been effective to gain PR for quite a while.
Google bot just checks if the link is reciprocated, and if it is, then it disregards it.
As it happens, Google wants you to naturally gain links, because your site deserves it, and not because you exchanged it with other webmasters.
So what you should do it either one-way links(the best), or 3-way links(A.K.A. site A links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links to site A).
Actually, google does not ignore anything, unless it has the nofollow tag(You can check for it in the source code), and usually forum signatures don't have a nofollow tag.
But forum signatures are usually low PR, so they won't do too much good.
i have to disagree with svarog. i do believe that google does get it's pr by links, which includes link exchange. i don't think one should stop exchanging links because they hear something from someone. until google says so themselves, i will keep exchanging links. i have 2 new sites. 1 that has link exchange and 1 that doesn't. it's funny that the one with link exchanges has a pr and the one that doesn't has pr0
Actually, I have heard that information from many sources, one of them was Google's official blog.
And you can ask any SEO specialist, he will tell you the same.
I'm not saying link exchange is entirely useless, all I'm saying is that it's usefulness is not half as good as one way links.
I think if you don't consider google's part in all this, that link exchanges can be great for traffic ...but that's placing them carefully with sites that have a certain sympathy and relevance to your own.
Gaining links naturally is very hard and requires a lot of patience. I think no one can really get rid of link exchanges. People will just go find a way around it through three way exchanges.
the traffic i'm looking for are those that come to my site through the search engines, when they type in a particalar keyterm. that's what i want and to get there, i need to exchange links. i'm not pushing link exchanges yet, but will shortly when i have my partner site up and running.
there is also contentual link exchange. where you don't exchange through a so called link exchange page, but through one of your pages that you have content on your site. this appears to be the next best thing.
Link Exchange is not effective any more
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