I have read quite a lot recently about reciprocal linking being a complete waste of time. Personally I do not tend to bother with reciprocal linking as It means I have to update a page and then upload it to my server and then many of the request are from low PR websites that are just starting out. I get several requests each week but I tend to delete most of them immediately.

Here is an interesting article on reciprocal linking being dead-

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/ ... popularity

Then there is this that says reciprocal linking is not dead

http://www.organizedassistant.com/artic ... e-dead-/92

What do you think

I suppose there's no harm in trading links IF the sister site is clearly related to your own -- a sort of "webmasters' mutual admiration" agreement. Sponsor sites are an obvious example. I have never accepted link exchange requests, though I have linked sites at the request of the webmaster if I really liked their work and believe my site membership would agree (I have a PR5 resources page for this purpose; I reserve the "top picks" category for up-and-coming sites).

If you're looking for links, one ripe arena is bloggers from your membership. As recognition of their blogging about your site, you can start a thread about the best blog entries you find related to your interest area. That's an example win-win: Your membership gets to know bloggers best work, and assuming they find value in your site, it may be added to their blog's links. For active bloggers, this can represent hundreds of backlinks.

Interesting topic.

To me, the "reciprocal linking being dead" assumption just does not make sens.

If spam-indexing and farm links ever was useful it's another story, but link exchange means many more case than this.

Let's start with defining link exchange :

Link exchange means you are willing to give links to receive some.

Now, the main difference with a strict backlink is that, you'll be as well linking to the domain linking to you.

What could actually cause link exchange to be weak, beside the backlink to be weak in itself (posted on a poor or unrelated page) would be to link back to the page where your backlink is posted, and to repeat this situation for the majority of your backlinks, and even worst, to concentrate all your exchanged links on the same page.
It stating the obvious to say a page with no text content and a majority of external links is poor SEO wise.

But you could a) give a link back from another domain of yours or b) give a link back from the same domain but not linking to the page where you backlink is, and on a page with content and minority of external links.

These two techniques would increase the complexity of the linking strategy and would make it harder for bots to tell these links should be less considered because of some "link exchange moderation" routine.

And actually, I do believe such type of poor link exchange filters exists in SEs, but I'm not sure it's the most important when it comes to take backlinks into account. To me, the quality (content, PageRank and the way it is related) of the page where the link is posted is way more important.

It was often stated that few backlinks could end up weighting a lot more than a lot, depending on their quality.

In this post, I elaborated a bit on a web site having PR6 with only 44 Google backlinks.

This is how much the quality matters, way more than the link exchange penalty IMHO, if ever was more than just checking if both links would not come from a page with many external links (the typical link exchange page).
I mean, what do you think would occur if you'd get a link back from google.com ? Even if you'd run one or many link back to Google, I'm pretty sure your server would not be able to handle what would follow

The first article you're pointing, supposed to show us link exchange is dead, does in the end not really state more than : "we should fight for the best backlinks".
And the second one does not really enters in contradiction.
What is for sure is paying does not mean much about the link quality, it can be a good thing to pay for a real good link, but paying is not what makes it so good.
Same rules as ever apply to evaluate the possible backlink quality, the fact that it will last in time being one of the most important just after relationship in content and PageRank.
That's probably why, unless you're really rich, paid links cannot be your only backlink source, because they are by definition not supposed to last for ever.

It's all a matter of what are we talking about. I never though running a link exchange page could be of a great interest, but always believed we should exchange links, in a clever way obviously, with well ranked related web sites. And the result depends on the web site we will be able to exchange links with, that's all.

In your case, I suggested you start to try exchanging links with website providing home work services, since it seems to me there must be many small companies (plumbers, tools resellers etc ..) with well ranked and related websites out there, even small.
Because 1) I think there is plenty of such website in the Internet and 2) I'm sure some of them are, despite the fact they are not visited a lot, old thus ranked and possibly very well, with good content, even few.
Do-ability being, as always, what comes first.

A good way to achieve this would be to start an DIY directory with a link back for submission, the goal being to avoid running a page with a majority of external links.

But you can think of many other

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I'm working on the directory idea.

Hopefully this will provide some good backlinks in the future

I already have an semi automated link exchange script on my site, through gotlinks.com but I feel it would be better if I gradually removed my site from it.

create the GotLinks page on your web site and link to it from your home page.

From what they say, it should not be this bad, it if only a regular link exchange page, it won't hurt, but will most likely end up as not much.

And it depends on the way all these web sites relates together. Could be somewhere to start from to share links directly with people from this list already linking to you, the most related obviously, and in a bit smarter way, like within an article or something like that.

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