Off topic links.

Good or bad

[gosman]

My travel website is PR6. I have a directory on it that links to other travel related sites.

I have had a request from an online gambling site that is PR7 to exchange links. This site ranks high in Google for it's keywords.

As it is not the same topic as my site is there a benefit from exchanging links?

[glengara]

Right now there is.

[cbpayne]

All links regardless of topic will help your PR (unless they are banned; the link can be crawled; etc)

On theme/topic links are speculated to give additional benefit in other parts of the algorithm if Google have implemented what is speculated (eg Topic Sensitive Page Rank; themeing; etc)