Unfortunately there are many that feel that the more links that lead to your website the better off you will be. This is completely untrue.
It is important to understand that links coming to you from sites with a low page rank will not help you and although some say it is no longer the case, in the past it hurt you. I tend to think it still does. I had a page rank of 4 and then suddenly my link showed up on link farms everywhere. I had never submitted my site to these places because I knew better. My page rank dropped to 1. This sucks…
You only want web sites with a page rank of 4 or higher to link to you and you want that site to be relevant to the content of your site! My business is SEO Copywriting in Sarasota. I do not want someone selling toilets to link to me. What good does that do? Plus, the search engines do not like it.
The search engines also do not want links leaving your site to lead to places that are not relevant to your own site. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. I have a client page with links going to web sites that are in no way related to the subject of my site. This may hurt me page rank wise, but it helps me tremendously in other ways— making money and gaining new clients.
Another interesting note, I have many sites with page ranks higher than four linking to me and some have linked to me for over 8 months. I saw in Google’s Webmaster Central today that they have finally noticed; they have noticed until now. In addition, I have a low page rank, but I also have all the #1 and page one placements I wanted on Google, MSN & Yahoo. Optimization is far more important than page rank, in my humble opinion.