Why Search Engines don't like you to join Reciprocal Link Exchange programs
By Bruce Hearder

People generally forget what the Internet is simply a vast network of individual websites joined together by links. Without links, websites would live in isolation getting little or no traffic, with the only visitors coming from web visitors that typed those sites directly into their web browser.

Because links are the lifeblood of the Internet, the search engines have actually started to treat each link as a vote for a site. So, if site A links to site B, the search engines would consider that site A has voted for site B. So the more the number of votes (links) for a site, the more important the search engines would deem that site to be.
Given the major importance that search engine traffic has nowadays, it is easy to understand why webmasters are constantly searching for a new way to get links to their websites.
 
So, to find more links, webmasters have started using reciprocal link exchange programs. These are generally commercial sites that arrange for other sites to link to your site in exchange for your site linking to other sites.

Link exchange programs made it easy for website owners to get a large number of links pointing to their websites with a minimal amount of work.
A lot of these links have little or no relevance with the main websites topic, and therefore are of almost no value to the human visitor. They are there solely to increase the number of links pointing to a website.

Its no wonder then that the search engines are starting to devalue the importance of these reciprocal links and more and more information is appearing where they are actively discouraging people form using these types of linking services.

The search engines generally favour one-way links (links that point to your site, without requiring a reciprocal link back) a lot more, and a commonly overlooked place to acquire incoming one-way links is through submitting your sites to link directories.
Most webmasters submit their sites to link directories manually, and this can be a very time consuming and boring process. There is software available that can speed up this process considerably, letting you acquire hundreds of quality links in a short period of time.