I have a programming blog and I was wondering if link exchange with other programming blogs (where I link to them and they link to me) is a good idea to improve my site's PageRank.
I know in general it is desirable because it will increase my page views and reader base.
Specifically my main page has a PageRank of 4 and I'm wondering if I could ever reach a PageRank 5 by doing a lot of link exchange for similar blogs around the same PageRank? Or do the links cancel out the backlinks in terms of PageRank?