I have started building a gambling portal a few months ago mainly for fun, I do not make a living from it. I had some reasons to do it mainly to get more webmaster contacts.
I do not use linkmanager on my site I use it on other webmasters sites to submit my own site. I have noticed that many times the page where my link appears has no rank or 0 rank. Note that Google only counts above page rank 3 backward links, example:
Link: http://www.casinoaffiliateprograms.com
I believe the correct method of exchanging links is to contact a webmaster personally and ask for an equal link exchange, page rank for page rank. What do you think?