Are reciprocal links still valued by Google?

I was thinking of exchanging links with some websites in the same industry as me, like having a links page, but now i am wondering whether it would do me any good at all? Do you guys think it is worth the hassle of emailing individual webmasters and asking them for a link exchange?

 

Would you exchange the links regardless of Google?

 

If i can be honest with you, i wouldnt. I am only considering doing it to increase my web presence though i believe people should naturally link to you by virtue of the usefulness of your site. I might be wrong or going mad trying to get into all these SEO/SEM stuffs

 

it does if you exchange with the site that has higher PR then yours..

 

For my site I did hundreds of free directory submission and I have maybe 80 reciprocals with decent pr sites that are related with my site.

Lately I also purchased some high pr dir. one-way links, but those links are too new to see results.

My experience is that the free directory submissions helped me a lot more than I thought was possible. But I did many and after some weeks I saw my site always jumping up in the serps. In the beginning it was hard, since I believe Google putted me in their sandbox. But after 7 months suddenly I saw my site appearing in in the serps for the main keywords. First at page 30, one month later page 20, one month later page 2 etc. Now I am second for both my most important keywords.

My site was pr4 at all pages. After a while I found out that an guy gave me a natural link on his site (pr2) to one of my inner pages and I got a lot of traffic to that page. Since than this page on my site got a pr5 So a natural link that brings traffic is very important, since this pr2 page brought me a pr5.

When I started my site I exchanged links with almost every site that could help me gaining pr. Now I focus alot more on traffic. I decided to continue reciprocal linking as far as those links bring traffic. I don't care too much for Google policies concerning reciprocal linking. It's my site and I want to promote it as I want, not as G wants me to do it.

Of course I keep an eye on my serps, but till now I think that my way of link building was not bad at all.

 

craigs list is my secret weapon... free links from a PR7 site if you know how to code them and make your ads in such a way that you don't get flagged.

 

Thanks very much for your responses. Just like you said, even if it wouldnt benefit you in Googles' eyes, reciprocal links might give you some decent traffic. And i think that's good enough.

 

yes its helpful but you must check the outbound links per page if you see outbounds link reaching 20 links per page then leave that site.

 

Yeah but dont listings automatically expire in 7 days? and when they do expire and you create a new listing, the URL is different from the original one, so there really is no benefit that i see, unless you just want to get your site indexed.

 

No. The listings do not expire until 45 days after it was created.

 

Actually the Craigslistings expire after 45 days. I haven't tried it to get indexed, I'll have to see if it works, and how quickly.