Bad Neighbor Link Exchange

It was brought to my attention that exchanging links with just any website on the internet is not a very good idea. Google and the other search engines not online look at the number of back links you get to your site but they also look at the quality of those links. The more relevant they are to your site the more valuable they are to google. But there is whats called the bad neighbor that can really hurt you in googles eyes. This is basicly when you link to another site their list of links effects your quality score in googles search engine. if they are buying links or using blackhat tricks your rankings can be hurt by this. so while backlinking thru link exchange looked like it was going to be an effective avenue for increasing our traffic. Thankfully my SEO consultants talked me out of it. Now I just have to go back and clean up the hodgepodge of bad link exchanges my company has entered into over the last 8 years. P.S. Links that lead to pages that nolonger exist is not a good thing either. keep track of your outbound links.