I've been exchanging home page links for years with some very good sites. Most of these links are towards the bottom of the page where they'd most likely be clicked on by visitors who ended up on our site through a general search term like "white widget" while they were really looking for "white round widgets". Or, by other sites looking for link partners. While they are useful to visitors, but not competitive with the sites I maintain, most of these have been reciprocated with site owners looking specifically for home page link exchanges. We were at a PR6, then a PR5, then back & forth PR4-5, now steady at PR5. With the constant changes in the value of PR, I'm wondering if home page exchanges still make any difference in comparison to a links page exchange with a lesser PR. Or, does being on a high PR site do just as well regardless of the PR of the page your link is actually on? It'd be nice to clean all that clutter off the home page if it doesn't make any difference.

The PR of pages that links to you definitely and directly effects your PR. As a very broad rule, a site will bring you up to one PR point less than its own. This is a VERY broad rule, and is not always the case.

The BigDaddy update appears changed the rules of reciprocal links. Non-reciprocal links are better... period. This is modeled after real life after all, where all the non-celebrities chatter about celebrities, but the celebrity has no idea who you are. If you were to look at the "links", a celebrity has no idea who you are, and has little else but inbound links.

Conversely, a co-op shopping group has collective buying power to purchase groceries at a lower cost, then divvy out the goods and pass its savings to the members. It has power because of the "links" between members, and there are very few inbound links -- unless the co-op is famous.

The later example creates a "shape". That shape is probably very easy to spot, and indicates some level of manipulation (reciprocation). Low levels of this shape fortified by additional organic inbound links shouldn't hurt. But if ALL your high PR inbound links are reciprocated, it's not going to help.