Marcia - 5:56 pm on Jul 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

Q.2. I wanted to join a link exchange. The site states that your site will be placed on their 4000 sites.

I wouldn't personally dream of going anywhere near something like that.

Q. Will this be looked as having too many links because of all the sites pointing back at my site? (Looked at as spam. I'm speaking as far as being a new site and being penalized.)

Don't know about penalizing, but it's exactly what's right in the webmaster guidelines about getting involved in artificial linking schemes to boost rankings.