A lot of new sites go crazy with the link exchange process.  They make like 50 new exchanges per day (or more) and think to themselves, “As long as I get link exchanges, there is no way I can fail”.  In actuality, sometimes link exchanges (especially quickly adding them) are bad for search engine rankings.  Here’s a few reasons why:

1)  Link exchanges are often seen as ways to manipulate search results.  Linking with a lot of sites fast will cause you to get penalized.  Try to go for quality over quantity: only link with thats that will add value to your visitors experience.

2)  Search engines might consider you to be a link farm(or a group of websites that automatically link to every other site in the group).  Link farms are seen as being illegal in most search engine’s eyes (including Google) and can cause you to get banned.

3)  Links added too fast will look suspicious, and often will be labeled as SPAM by search engines… this will also get you penalized (or worse).

4)  Sometimes quickly getting link exchanges without carefully looking at the site’s content will cause you to link with sites that are… unrelated to your site, already receiving Google peanlties, or have too many outgoing links (will cause there link going to you to be worth less).

5)  Webmasters are mostly dishonest, cheating, and looking to get an edge on their competitor (no offense, but it’s true).  Therefore, they will remove your link or hide it from search engines.

So, before you go all crazy with link exchanging, think first if it is really worth it.  There are plenty of other ways to get links to your site, so perhaps you should consider those first!