yes... it helps alot... and the reason / logic for reciprocal link exchange is to invite google (and of other SE's) crawler onto your website and provide extra space to read the content... the more often is the crawler visit the more chances to get your site cached and that would results to come up on google serps (if you have good content alongwith keywords)....
Recipricol links help, (with good anchor text) links are probably the main factor when it comes to the ranking algorithm. However it's much better to get one way links or even a triangular or four way link exchange.
Yea. Reciprocal Link Exchange will benifit if you do it by taking much care. Do Link exchange with higher PR site in your industry. And also use your targeted keywords in Anchor Text.
as they said it really helps. Reciprocal linking is also a good way to build inbound links, more chances to be crawled and if your lucky enough you might be able to get a traffic from it.
People, the main thing is to exchange links with quality, not quantity. And don't exchange links with delisted sites, it'll hurt your rankings, you should always check your reciprocal partner in google's index.
Reciprocal linking helps, but if the site that has ur link is somehow banned from Google, then ur said to have Bad Site partners. That time, your site ranking can be affected
Link Exchange is a good way to increase link popularity, you just have to have in account: 1. Exchange links only with sites with good, related content 2. PR doesn't matter 3. Quality of the site 4. Do it naturally, keep growing your links through time 5. Is better to have 10 quality related links, than 100 not related, poor quality links.