Who defines what's "natural"? If I make a website and focus solely on quality content and some advertising, I can NATURALLY get one-way inbound links to my content and build a great website without every exchanging one link. I think people with many recip links need to be evaluated as not-natural. A interesting thing happens when you build a quality website with quality content, people link to it and talk about it. If that's how you trained yourself to do things and that's your limitation, then yes, recips seem "natural" to you. So back to my point, who defines "natural", because what's "natural" depends on perspective.
Reciprocals are valuable if they bring you targeted traffic. But forget about ranking benefits. Waste of time IMO.
Sure, and as mad4 said you can write an article and submit it to HUNDREDS of different article sites. In this article you would put your site link somewhere... e.g. "This info is brought to you by... " and the hope is that people will read the article, be intrigued or impressed and come visit your site! There are HUNDREDS of article directories with which you can submit your articles. There is also sumbmission software available that will enable you to submit articles to several directories at once! I can't post any links yet but I know I saw some article info on other threads here at DP.... do a lil keyword search and you should find them. If not, PM me and I can give you a couple of links that way. Lyte EDIT: Maybe it will let me put up a DP link... Nope, okay... look for the DP thread number =63771 There you'll find a lot of what you need.