Yes it’s true. Reciprocal links do not play a big role in search engine optimization anymore in my opinion. They still work and can influence your search engine rankings, but not as much as it was 3-4 years ago.
I noticed that Google started stripping websites out of their page rank for having to many outgoing links from their link directories. Latest update made a lot of webmasters mad and frustrated. Lots of authority sites lost their high page ranks, and there is a good reason for that.
You see, when your site has a page rank of 7 or 8, you will get people trying to pay you good money for linking back to their sites. Google doesn’t like it at ALL. You will most likely get penalized and the site that is selling links could get banned as well.
Anyway, going back to reciprocal linking, if you are exchanging links with other sites then don’t include more than 15-20 links per page. Also, if I were you I would only have one “partners” page, where you only list highly relevant link partners. Don’t exchange links with 100 websites or 1000s like some do. It could actually hurt you. A lot of times you won’t be able to monitor them to check if some of them are black hat sites. Keep in mind that linking to a black hat site could also get you a penalty from the Big G.
One-way links are so easy to get nowadays, that there is no need to exchange links anymore. So how do you get them? Well, let see:
- Article marketing (write 10-20 articles per month and submit them to article directories with links back to your websites)
- Press releases (write 1-2 press releases per month – one good press release could result with 100s of one way backlinks to your website)
- Social bookmarking (If you have great content then bookmark it through onlywire or some other social sites – this could go viral and get you a lot of links and traffic)
- Link baits (create some web based tools that visitors can use on your website – this will get other webmasters to link to it)
- Create free blogs on Blogger.com and link back to your sites
As you can see there is so many ways to get one-way links, that you almost don’t want to waste time on reciprocal linking.
Those links will also have much bigger influence on your search engine rankings, so get as many as possible. One-way links from articles, press releases, and other relevant sites shows Google that you have great content that is worth linking to.
Hope this helps 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Having a automated bookmarking software is essential, because this way you will save an average of 3-4 hours a day, or an average of $200/month in bookmarking services while you get the best results in terms of traffic and Page Rank increase.I think that social bookmarking is a process you just cannot pass over if you desire your business to actually start flying, also using a great automatic bookmarking software is definitely the most powerful and cost effective way to do it.
Yes i agree One way links are very effective. They will help you to rank high on search engine if they are from high pr sites.There are a lot of ways to gain them you explained them very well.Thanks for the nice post. I found it interesting. All your blogs are always helpful.
Great post I Admit One way links are the great seo strategy to create back links of your web site or web page. These links also increase your link popularity and it is the main benefit of one way links because search engine give great importance to link popularity while it provide ranking to our web site.