Will a link exchange page hurt rankings?

Does anyone know if having a link exchange page (a page with a form for recip links) hurts rankings? I've seen no evidence that it does but I was thinking that the SE's see the form and ding the site maybe? Anyone?

I have a blog roll with numerous backlinks to websites with similar content (the same market), they included backlinks to my blog as well. As far as I can tell, they do not have any negative impact to overall rankings. At least I didn't see any yet. Of course, I think they do not have significant (if any) positive impact either. However, if you add a page to your site only for exchanging backlinks and the backlinks are irrelevant then I think it might be considered bad practice by Google in my opinion.

"However, if you add a page to your site only for exchanging backlinks and the backlinks are irrelevant then I think it might be considered bad practice by Google in my opinion." - this is accurate and something to avoid.

When it comes to blogrolls, while they do have linking benefit, they can also have a detrimental affect on your site if a manual review is done. Why? They are hardly ever done well and look awful. As you want to keep visitors on your site and not running away, try to avoid them or at the very least get creative on how it is setup.

A nice alternative to these would be to create in content links and try and do guess posts to popular blogs where the subject matter is highly relevant.

Hope that helps!

Ya this might happen if you try to do anything that is out of the laws and regulation.
You should maintain the laws and regulations properly to get good results.

My site is PR3 and I think that's pretty much all down to blogroll link exchange.

I think it is not good for a site. It is better not to do it imo.