Yes Yes Yes!!! finally. You are absolutely right.
MUTUAL linking has been around from the first days of the internet becoming a public media, and genuine linking between pages should never be an issue.

However mutual linking is not about a link page on one site linking to the "home" page of another, because in the vast majority of cases that will be a contrived link exchange.
Genuine, honest to goodness mutual linking is about one page linking to another page, which may or may not be the "home" page of a site because the subjects of each page are complementary.
NOTE: (to the usual suspects). that's complementary. NOT relevant or on the same "theme", but complementary.

Originally Posted by coolslko

Well.......however natural linking or onw way linking is prefereed by google but we also can not ignore link exchange with relevant sites.

Link exchange may benefit and also may harm you but it depen how you are doing. If you involve in link farms or unrelevant sites to exchnage links it will sure harm your site but exchanging links with relevant sites that is useful for users always help to increase your link popularity and hepl in terms of ranking.

So, focus on link exchange with relevant sites only that are useful to your site visitors too.

yes I agree I would only exchange links with relevant topic related sites and I wouldn't use automated systems or any of that garbage .And again all things in moderation.If you exchanged a few links here and there on topic this will help you .....especially if you can get links on pages with higher authority than yours.

I thinks link exchange dosen't benifit you at all. Instead of wasting time on link exchange, i suggest you to make efforts on one way link building. I suggest you to write quality articles and submit it to all major high pr article directories. You can also do social bookmarking for one way link building. You can visit http://directorycritic.com for big list of high pr article directories. You can searh on google for list of social bookmarking websites. So instead of wasting time on link exchange, just try to make quality one way links.



Wish you all the luck.

seem like a risk to take esp if you got adsense on hand at your site

Proper reciprocal link building is a strategy that pays off very well.
It has to be done with great care and responsibility. There are a number of key elements to succeed:
The link partners are in the same or associated industry and are not in competition (smash repairs in UK and smash repairs in US)
Link and anchor text is not exessive
There are a limited number of links per page
Page size is smaller then the rest of the pages on the site
The page basic optimization (meta data) is intact and the page is crawlable

Of course, there is the other side of the coin - your proposed reciprocal partner should comply with above and more.
Consider the link neighbourhood of the proposed partner
Consider other links relevancy on the page
Are you reciprocating or participating in a 3 way exchange (no no)
Is the links page of your proposed partner visible to the search engines, crawlable and cached?
Is the links page included in the search results when searched for a large extract from the page?

and a lot more

99% of reciprocation requestes my clients get are rejected based on the above criteria, but the rest of the links are there in google as a valid back link with high relevancy.

Val,

Originally Posted by ssandecki

I think you need to review the below URL...

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=66356

This part should signal part of your answer...

well he got the answer...

Originally Posted by WhoItIs

I disagree. Link exchanges existed before Google did. They have been used for many years to share traffic between related sites and to increase awareness of a site in general. Since this is true, one cannot say that all link exchanges are schemes designed to increase your site's Google ranking or PageRank. They are used as an additional means of getting visitors to a particular site. If ranking is increased as a result of this exchange, it doesn't mean that the link exchange in itself was designed to affect Google rank. If you exchange links with a limited number of related sites for the purpose of sharing visitors, you should not have a problem with Google. If you participate in a link scheme then you will.

I agree that there are more link schemes than valid link exchanges. I disagree that ALL link exchanges are frowned upon by Google.

I agree. When exchanging links one should be sure that the site linking to his site is quality and relevant. And its also important that the link are among the relevant content or among other relevant links.