In order of importance aspects of on-page and off-page SEO gives you the most bang for your buck? I don't want to spend 50000 hours writing articles if 500 hours worth of link exchanging helps more.
Exchanging links is extremely time consuming and google has devalued these types of links. While gaining backlinks from articles will give you greater seo benefits because these links are one way links.
I realize this of reciprocal links. I was thinking 3 way - not the French kind... But isn't it true of articles and directories that their "link juice" is divided up evenly among all outgoing links? So wouldn't it be better to get 1 one-way link from a related site with a PR 5 site with no other outgoing links than posting to 1000 article sites, each with PR 5, but with over 10000 other outgoing links?