Should you exchange links with a site whose links page has zero PR?

The page rank of the link page doesn't matter too much, provided you can drill down to that page from the homepage with a spider simulator. If it has a PR of zero - that's not too uncommon. If it isn't cached by Google, it could just mean that the page is new and hasn't yet been spidered.

Typically, you'll want to look at each potential link partner carefully - what you're looking for:

1. PR of the homepage - the better this is, the more impact you'll get

2. Can you use a spider simulator to drill down to their links pages?

3. When you go through the site, are all the pages on the same domain name? (i.e. - the homepage is www.myREsite.com but once you start clicking it changes to www.myOTHERsite.com)

4. When you're looking at the homepage, click at the end of the address bar and type in robots.txt (i.e. http://www.partnersite.com/robots.txt ) and hit enter - check the text file that appears and make sure they haven't blocked their links pages. If you get an error that there is no robots.txt file or it is empty, then the site is okay to link with.

5. When they link to your site, can you hover the mouse over the link and view a pure address? Sometimes (esp. with Advanced Access sites) you'll get something like this instead: http://www.partnersite.com/Nav.aspx/Page=Http://www.yoursite.com - they're not intentionally trying to 'cheat' it's simply the way the admin panel works. A link like this is of no benefit to your site.

6. If you don't use a spider simulator, you'll want to view the source of the links page and look for a 'no follow' tag at the end of each link. (The spider simulator saves time in this regard)

Basically, most link partners aren't trying to cheat - some do so by accident. Some do try to cheat - what you can look for are a few simple things...

If their homepage has a Page Rank of 4/5 or 6 and their links pages are NOT in Google's cache - they're probably hiding those links pages. You may want to avoid them - or use a spider simulator to backup your theory. However, it could just be that they recently moved or renamed their links pages and the search engines haven't caught up with the change.

If their links pages appear to 'live' on a different domain from the one they want you to link to, then what they're doing is a 3 way or triangle link scheme. This does work (for now) but many SEO experts worry that eventually, these type of schemes will get sites banned. If you link to their site A - and they link to your site (C) from another site (B) that makes the triangle linking scheme.

Many folks whose sites use templates are engaging in link exchanges but don't realize that their links out to your sites aren't visible to the search engines - yet you notice that they're sites are ranking well. Why? Because all the sites that link to them are virtually giving one-way links into their site - since their links back can't be seen. Many, many folks don't realize that they're not getting the benefit, so they keep those links live - visually, you can see that they link to you but you don't realize that the search engines can't see them.