The point was to demonstrate the difference in trust levels. If someone tells you about product XYZ and it would appear that they are not affiliated with the company, they do not advertise that company, and in fact they have nothing to gain from recommending the product, you will say “this is a genuine recommendation, it is given for no reason other than to be helpful”. That is the equivalent on a one-way link.
If you see an affiliate link, it may still be useful to you, but you know that the link exists for a reason other than to be helpful. That is similar to a reciprocal link. It may be relevant, it may be useful to the reader, but it was put there only to make each site more popular in the search engines. Google know that, so of course they will treat these links with less importance.
That is a simpified example, but it was meant only to demonstrate a point – that different styles of linking convey different levels of trust.
Well in 2002 everything was exactly as you described. The change to the value of reciprocal links is much more recent.
How recent I can’t say, I’ve not been doing this for nearly as long as you. All my testing has taken place in the last 6 months.
BTW, all I say relates to Google; MSN and Yahoo are much less strict, much less sophisticated (so far), and therefore I would think recriprocal links probably still work there just as well as ever before. But Google is much stricter.
Anyway, you’re right to say that we’ll never convince each other, so you keep doing your thing and I’ll do mine and hopefully we will both be successful 