In a last few days I've looked through a few hundreds sites with the highest PR in my industy (sitting in SERP'S tops 500 for most important keywords) in attempt to find a good partners for link exchange.
Surprisingly I found that about 90% of them are groups of interlinked sites (very often with the same design and with minimal content). I used to think that this is a form of spam and was staying away from taking the risk of "linking to bad neighborhood issue". Now I'm not so sure about it. Thouse sites are usually not in the same SERPs and they have unique content - so may be from SE user's point of view they are not spam?
Apart from risk of Google penalty I can see another issue with it. As many webmasters pointed out here linking to outside world helping to such interlinked rings look more natural and decreasing their risk of penalty. So by linking to it I would help spamers?
Could you share you experience in link exchange with such "gray" webmasters?
