[quote]Who are you linking to? [/quote]
What are you asking about? My Website linking to other websites or other websites linking to my site?
In technical terms the first one called as Outgoing Links(link from your site to others). The second one Incoming links(links pointing your website)

[quote="SEO4U"]I think linking to bad, crappy sites that have low SERPs can be ultimately bad for your site.[/quote]
What do you mean by low SERP of a site? How do you measure it? In general we measure a websites score based on the site's PR and Traffic.

[quote="SEO4U"]In contrast placing links on your site to reputable, well established resources can help to increase your SE position.[/quote]
Placing a reputable website's link on your site will not increase your website's search engine position. If a Reputable website's link is placed on your website with an agreement of reciprocal linking, then your website gains benefit in terms of Traffic from that website. The additional benefit is a single(because you link to a single reputable site) quality back-link. That's it.

What are you thoughts?[/quote]

Both have to be balanced and structured well to gain quality score.

[quote="cunghuong"]Do not link to too many sites which are not relevant to yours! You should concentrate on quality relevant sites![/quote]

Linking to too many irrelevant/relevant websites is not all a problem! But you shouldn't be greed to gain links with less time. This will be considered as spam!

[quote="seopiper"]You should like to related theme sites that do have at least PR 1 above link pages.
This will help a lot already.[/quote]

What do you mean by 'like to related theme sites' ?

You were the first person to talk about reciprocal linking and its effect and I am wondering how could you react to this reciprocal linking issue even before some raised it!



I assume you were confused about placing another website's link on your forum site right? Then all that depends on your agreement and your choice. If you want to allow other website link to be placed on the Top of every page of your site, just as this forum has "Web Directory Australia" banner, you can. It all depends on the area of his interest and your benefits.

If you were not asking about this, please give more details.




Keyword ranking in search engine results is given on basis of 100 or more algorithms. However, the core value for any website to rank on search engine results pages lies in the relevant and popularity of a website. These are two main factors that helps in keyword ranking. Just a link from an authority website neither increase not boost the keyword rank of a website.