Originally Posted by jayeff

Unless I misunderstood the original post in this thread, I'm not sure where linking comes into it. But I had to pick up on your post because it illustrates several common misunderstandings.

Popular, SE-strong blogs often do have blogrolls, list of links to other sites. But they are usually either credits (say for people who have contributed to the site) and/or links to sites which the site operator believes his audience will enjoy. Since they are "natural" links, they may enhance a site's appeal to its visitors, sufficient to outweigh their disadvantage as potential traffic leaks. In SEO terms, any direct advantage is almost entirely for the sites being linked to, not to the site doing the linking. However some of those links may (eventually) result in a link back and if any of those reciprocal links turn out to be from authoritative sites, the SE payoff can be major.

What the operators of commercial, especially get-rich-quick sites cannot stand, is that this natural cross linking is both slow and uncertain. Contextual cross-linking is more effective than lists of links, but either way, the concept of "throwing bread on the water" if you like, is of little appeal. Adult webmasters in particular want to be able to arrange formal link exchanges with other sites and hope this will be an effective shortcut.

Of course it rarely is. Not only are such links usually chosen on the basis of comparative traffic or PR, but the one thing you did get right is that they usually add too many links. Most sites do not have much authority in the first place. The more sites to which they link, the less value each link has.

I would guess that in SE terms, the vast majority of adult site link exchanges are a complete waste of time. Many probably do more harm than good and unless they can instead function as an advantageous or at least equitable way of exchanging traffic, sites would be better off without them.