“Say I link to 10 other pages, my internal pages will suffer a PR loss (let’s assume I care about PR), but I would also have an extra 10 pages linking to me which would effectively boost my PR. So basically, my PR would only suffer a minor loss at the very worst.”
PR is about pages not sites, so you linking to another page that links back to you will have the exact same effect — so far as your link is concerned — as if you linked to one of your own interior pages that linked back to you. Except the link power you send to your subpage will basically 85 divided by the number of links you have on the main page. Suppose you have 20 links on your main page, that means the main page with a value of 100 sends about a value of 4 to your subpage. Now the subpage links back to the main page, but it only has about 85% of 4 as its link power, so if it also has about twenty links on the page, the amount of link power you send back to the main page is well under 1.
Even if you were just talking about one link on each page, you give 85 to one page, the subpage gives back about 72 in terms of link power (85% of 85). So, there is significant dissipation in link power.
But again, in terms of PR, it doesn’t make any difference if a link goes off domain or to your subpages.
In other words, trading links for PR purposes is pointless. Nothing is accomplished (unless you swap with a page that gives you more PR than you give it).
“But having an extra 10 links to my site with my targeted keywords in the anchor text, then my site would get a boost in the search engines – at least in google.”
Yes anchor text is a completely different issue. However, again if you just link to ten of your own pages, and link back to your own main page with the anchor text you want, it’s the same thing. And it is a helluva lot easier to police yourself to make sure the anchor text says what you want.
Anchor text and PR are basically the same, but the one thing very different in terms of links to and from other domains is that links within your own domain are all more or less defined the same. If you have 100 internal links that help a search engine understand a domain is about gambling, adding 10 more internal ones is just repeating the message. In contrast, if you get ten links that offer “new messages”, that reinforces to the engine what you already told it. In other words, it is one thing for you to say 100 or 110 times that your domain is about gambling, but if Got2bet, WizardofOdds, Winner Online and seven other domains the engine knows is about gambling pile on and say “yes, this domain is about gambling”, that is a big help.
“Now – as for PR I don’t care much about it. I believe having a PR4 and having 30 links with anchor text “keyword 1 keyword2” is better than having a PR10 with 10,000 links with the anchor text “click here”. That said, since most people believe PR is of worth I do check mine and other pages PR. That’s my opinion and so far it’s working out pretty well. But this is not the question I have asked.”
I’ll take the 10,000 links any day, and its not close at all. Give me the PR10 and and I’ll make 100,000 pages with targeted anchor text on every gambling topic under the sun and rule every single search result there is.