What I have found is that what matters is what kind of links are linking to you in a sense you may not taken into consideration. Is the link prominate or buried in the site on a links page that no one visits.
Most links pages, per se, are ment to boost se popularity by means of being detected by ses and are generally placed on the site in such a way that it's the last place a person visits. They are not placed in a visible, easily accessed part of the site.
I have many links in the casino business but very seldom get visitors from any of them. That's because the last thing a casino webmaster wants is for a visitor to visit another casino website and lose business to them. Some of them are not really links at all but a call to a database that will produce the link if clicked. In other words, it will do nothing for your popularity. I'll get back to this in a moment.
If a link is visible, it's another story. I traded with a site some time ago (porn) that placed my link on the front menu, because it did not threaten his business and rounded out his menu nicely. I did the same for him. I looked at my log today and out of 40, I had 4 from that site alone. Well, I wish all my links were like this. Sure, I'd get a lot more business from links.
What really matters is how visible the links are and that's about it. No one in their right mind will place a competing link where the visitor will find it. I sure wouldn't.
Taking up the matter I mentioned 2 paras ago...when you trade links, be sure it's a link and not a call to a database to retrive your link. Go to:
http://pokerroom.st/
First of all you'll note that the partner link is at the bottom and not easily found. Click it. Then click any catagory. When you see the list of links, right click any one of them and scroll down to "Copy Shortcut" and click. You have now copied the address the link is calling out. Paste it in your address bar and it will look something like this:
http://pokerroom.st/go.php?id=67
That is not a link to the persons website. It is a call to a database to get the address and will do you no good as far as your link popularity is concerned. Just look around the dir there and this guy has hundreds of links to him, but not a one directly to anyone. This guy knows what he's doing.
You should always check to be sure that it is actually a link before trading. There's a lot of this going around. A lot!
peace...Paul