Originally posted by arkyt
Regarding linking – it’s awful to say, but in order to keep pace with the Jones’s you have to join in the masquerade to some extent. I just recently started exchanging home page links on a few of my sites – I felt this was necessary in order to maintain myself.
Don’t give in to the dark side. You won’t be “keeping pace”, unless your goal is to hurl yourself into an expanding black hole. Anything more than a very few off domain links on the front page is becoming a sign of low quality (and again, whether it is or not is not really important). Also, in terms of pagerank, unless the site you are linking to has significantly higher PR than you, its a waste to do these links. You would be better off linking internally to your content pages.
The only two reasons you should be linking off your front page (besides to casino entities) are user friendliness, or to send the search engine bots a message of: “hey, look at me, I know what a high quality site is, come check me out more.”