Hi, When someone links to anothers site by exchanging links, do the search engines look down on that ? Is that considered black, gray or white hat ? Example is listed below http://www.racknroad.com/links.html Thanks
It's not black or gray as long as the links are relevant. Don't go exchanging links with car forums if you run a recipe blog.
In the past setting up a link exchange was great off page optimization. Then link farms and link networks were built where a website would be listed on thousand of pages to boost its popularity. That is where black hat techniques come into play. Now the engines look at what type of site you run and what type of site you have shared links with. Now keep in mind it doesn't matter who links to your website, because you really do not have any control over that. However you control who you link to so if your doing a link exchange try and keep it in the same market as yourself if you are wanting to build a link page like you listed. Also when exchanging links with other sites, the more links they have on there links page the worse it does for you. Google will see all those site links and share the "popularity" among them all. Try and link with pages who do not have 50 or 100 links per page.
Reciprocal links are fine if both sites have content that is some how related. Don't over do it and go sitewide with reciprocal links because that can hurt you.