I met info about Google's new algorithm and the importance of one-way linking. My question is, what will happen with the reciprocal links we have gathered for years.
AS of now Google prioritize IBL than reciprocal linking because, it is clear to Google and the other search engines that the sole purpose of these sites is to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your site. Since there is no value added for the search engine's users, they in turn give no value to these links.
Link exchanges do hold some value, as rkalajian said most likely they hold more value if they come from a relevant site. You should spend your time and effort building one-way links, they have much more SEO value than link exchanges. Spending your time building rich unique content will help produce natural links to your site, which are the same thing as one-way links. Providing useful content will almost certainly help build backlinks because people just love to link to "useful" content.
well according to google: Excessive reciprocal links can negatively impact your site's ranking... but still working just gather quality/related links..
Reciprocal links are not completely worthless, but the chance that Google will feel that "the two of you decided to exchange to manipulate" are higher ( especially if the sites are not related to each other) At the same time if two sites link to each other, it cannot necessarily be considered link exchange. Many of the biggest sites in the industry link to each other because they think it would be a good source of information for their readers, and not because they want to do a link exchange.
SE measure one-way link as more important when it comes link popularity,. Reciprocals are still ok as long we practice it in a proper way,.
Last year I had a site that was banned from MSN because of reciprocal links. Ridiculous, but I've never done reciprocal link building since then. One way is the way to go.
Google is taking a lot of action to prevent any benefits from link farms. However, like said above, relevant reciprocal links are still good, though they do not carry as much weight as one-way links. Then again, nobody really knows how Google weights links.