Forum Moderators: open
There have been some recent posts about spinning wheels trying to get a lot of reciprocal links to very little avail.
Also, the traffic you get doesn't necessarily affect the PR you're given. If anything it's the other way around.
It means some site that other sites think is valuable thinks your site is valuable. Of ocurse this is a measure of your site being "better". It's not foolproof or more than just ballpark accurate, but it is usually a definite measure of quality.
"Surely it's more important that a large number of sites link to you that are not from a link farm or similar?"
Surely determing this is not easy by any stratch. Having a large number of sites link to you should mean basically nothing. It's easy enough to make a jillion useless sites, or to join a junk link program. Worthless. PR on the other hand can be manipulated, but it is perhaps 100 times more difficult to do. And, in general, higher PR sites are higher for merit reasons. There are plenty of exceptions, but given the choice between an on topic PR8 site and an on topic PR1 site, the PR8 will be much more useful the vast majority of the time.