Be careful what sites you send links to as well. I can’t prove this, but it make sense to me if your site is seen sending a lot of links to sites that are prime candidates for search engine penalties (for whatever reasons), you might suck up some of the penalty too. This is especially important for you bloggers selling text links – I make this mistake myself – check every site that buys a link from your blog to see what you are endorsing.

A link exchange is a confederation of websites that operates similarly to a web ring. Webmasters register their web sites with a central organization, that runs the exchange, and in turn receive from the exchange HTML code which they insert into their web pages. In contrast to a web ring, where the HTML code simply comprises simple circular ring navigation hyperlinks, in a link exchange the HTML code causes the display of banner advertisements, for the sites of other members of the exchange, on the member web sites, and webmasters have to create such banner advertisements for their own web sites.