High PR links from relevant sites will help in building your own PR. It would be better if it was just an inbound link rather than a reciprocal though.
Whether reciprical links are viewed as good or bad really depends on one thing... are the two sites relevant to one another and will the users on both sites benefit from a link to the other site. If site A's users would benefit from a link to site B AND site B's users would benefit from a link to site A then a reciprocal link would likely withstand a manual review by a Googler and be considered legitimate. However, if for example you have a baby clothing site with reciprocal links to a online casino site, that would likely NOT withstand a manual review and would likely be devalued so that the link passes no PR and does nothing to help you rank. Another problem with recipricals is that they seem to end up on links pages rather than on a page that is relevant to your site. If you're going to reciprocal link to another site, you should be sure to place a link to their site on a page on your site that is relevant to the target site... and visa versa. As the previous poster said, one way inbound links are preferred but having reciprocals are NOT bad as long as you follow the guidelines above.
reciprocal link exchange good for PR & improve to ranking, but we should remark that both side will be relevant & soonly cached by Google.
Reciprocal links are arranged when two web sites agree to link to each other. Reciprocal links are also known as "link swaps", "link exchanges" and "link partners". A common misspelling is "reciprical links". Reciprocal links help you in two ways: 1. They increase your web site traffic, from people who click on the links. 2. Reciprocal links also play a major role in boosting your rankings in search engines. Warning: Late in 2005, Google's Matt Cutts made it clear that it's possible to "overdo" reciprocal links. Getting good, solid, reciprocal links should be part of your links strategy, not your total marketing strategy. When ranking sites, the major search engines take into account the number and quality of the sites that link to you. Persuading good quality, relevant sites to link to you can be tedious, time-consuming and frustrating. Here are some tips to increase your chances of success. One way to find link partners is to do searches in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to find sites which complement yours but are not direct competitors. Many sites also link to direct competitors, figuring that the benefits outweigh any disadvantages.
Reciprocal links are extremely stable, in the aggregate. Sure, you'll lose some links over time, but by and large, they tend to stay in place indefinitely, providing traffic day after week after month after year.
A very common misconception about link exchanges is "The more links you have the higher you will be ranked." While part of this is very accurate, we must understand that the worng types of links can do more harm than good. You would do well to avoid participating in link farms, the reason to stay away form this is because these have become recognized by the search engines, and by Google's anti-spam algorithm specifically, as red flags for spam - and can often get your site banned from their index. And it makes sense - if you have thousands of non-relevant links pointing to your site, that does not say much about the legitimacy of your content. Major search engines have begun to aggressively penalize web sites that are deemed to be engaged in such linking strategies.