I hear different things all the time. I hear link trades are looked at as spam even if the trade is from a relevant site. just wondering does google look at reciprocal link trades as more spammy now and days? Do they help ranking at all? If you had to choose one form of 2-way reciprocal link trading what would it be. Which out of these are the safest. Link Page Trades? Homepage Trade? Sitewides trades?
I don't like reciprocal back links. I think one way back links are much better. There are several ways to get one way back links as well. You can purchase them, build them through blog comments, forum posts, article writing, etc.
I am on the fence with this... So long as links made via link exchanging are not passing any PR or backlinking credit, I guess search engines should be okay with it....(provided you are not overdoing and are linking in related niches) But, search engines nowadays are no more just a robot that you can fool. They employ hundreds of quality check representatives who manually check the search results and investigate dark webmasters....The very simple reason of not accepting link exchange is that- the two websites are favoring each other and clearly telling search engines that they do not believe in gaining authority naturally.