It is a commonly held and stated belief that Google devalues reciprocal links these days. The hey day of “I’ll link to you, you link to me, and we’ll both get up the rankings” is long gone. And when you consider the reasoning behind this, it is probably not a bad thing. What real value does a random link give to your visitors? Not a lot.

That does not mean that working with other webmasters for your mutual benefit is a bad thing or that there is no SEO benefit to be gained. The one thing that you should always bear in mind is that, if the visitor benefits, so does the site. This is the theme I shall be writing on over the next few days, so subscribe to my feed or watch out for my Twitter updates if you want to learn how you can get good mileage out of genuine reciprocal linking arrangements with other sites in your market.