Link exchanging certainly can be a bit of a nightmare, I found this Link Exchange Scams explained site when someone tried to scam me with a fake PR. I couldn’t understand how someone was showing a PR6 when they were not even Google indexed. Hence my search and my arrival on this site. Clearly I am into SEO but had not stumbled across this scam before.
Basically what happens is that you get invited to link to a site in return for a link back to your site from a very high PR site. Looks great PR is showing to be genuine and you may be tempted to skip the usual checks. But as the site I found explains, the page rank has been hijacked from another source, and there are various means for doing this.
Bottom line is the scammer gets a good link back to them from a site with genuine page rank and you get a link back from a fake site that is likely to have its page rank disappear overnight, and is not Google indexed anyway. So anyone looking for that page in Google will not find it, and effectively the link is completely worthless.
