About 4 months ago I changed my philosophy on links and as far as I can tell it has worked well.
1.) I limit the links on my homepage to about 25. To get on my home page I need a reciprocal link to the home page of a site that has the same or higher page rank than me. Currently PR4.
2.) I place all requests on my link page in return for a link on their link page if they dont want to swap home page links.
The strategy worked well and I am finally closer to the top of the query for our search terms. We have been averaging 6000 unique visitors a month.
Also, our site is ALL original content so that may also be helping.
If anyone is interested in doing this checkout the site. As for the number of request I get it seems to have died down recently.
sedgecourtjournalfootball.blogspot.com