I’m tierd of hearing that.. That’s simply far from being the truth. It is an unbased rumor. It is amazing how fast all these rumors about linking spread and turn into a guideline without being based. These are all speculations. Nothing more, Nothing Less.
This reciprocal links devaluating rumor started a long time ago when Google has began targting link farms that were actually sites with nothing but thousands of recprocated links.
As long as you don’t run a link farm with thousands of reciprocated links, reciprocal links are valuable and that’s based on my own experience.
Google knows the link exchange is a natural way of getting traffic from relevant sites.
Think about this scenario:
If You have a pet site, and you know about a good pet food company.. You even buy their dog food for your dog who loves it. You can place a link to them on your site and recommend their food to your visitors. After all, it is a pet site and your visitors have to feed their pets, right?
So you contact the pet food company and ask them to recommend your site to their visitors and in exchange you will do the same.
Does this seem imaginable? Do you think the people at Google think this is not a realistic scenario and any such link must be treated as junk?
It’s easy to say reciprocal links are dead, I will not be amazed if people will start believe that google will ban their sites if they don’t fart 3 times a day. {please excuse my language}
I’ve used reciprocal linking. I still use it and it works great for me.. even on my own sites network i link all the sites and reciprocate and they all get great PR eventually and even rank well.
Reciprocals links are like any other links as long as you don’t have thousands of them and not all at once.