When you run a link exchange campaign, it is useful to look at your website from the point of view of a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!. Though nobody knows exactly how in fact they look at websites except for their engineers and specialists, still we can make some guesses and assumptions based on common sense.
There three possible types of links as related to your website: one-way incoming links, one-way outgoing links, and reciprocal links.
One-way (non-reciprocal) incoming links
Every website should have incoming (or inbound) links coming from external websites. Through such hyper links visitors find the website in the Web, and links represent the key element of HTML as HyperText Markup Language. The greater is the number of incoming links point to your website, the more authoritative and visible it becomes as compared to competitors.
The best incoming links are those which are not reciprocal, that is, you get a link from external webpage without placing a return link on yours. This is often called a natural link, where an external webmaster sets a link to your website just because he liked it so much, or there is a lot of terribly useful information on your pages, or the website offers outstanding service or product. I would share some ideas about such natural link building in a separate article.
Another way to get a non-reciprocal link or one-way link is to purchase a link. Many online directories would sell a link to your website. The best-known of such directories is Yahoo! Directory, where you can place a link to your resource for an annual fee of 299 US$.
Google says that selling/buying links can be seen as manipulation of its SERP, especially if you buy links to increase your PageRank. See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736 for more info.
There are several techniques to build one-way links to your website without requesting other webmasters. See an article on how to build one-way links.
One-way (non-reciprocal) outgoing links
These are just the links that you publish in your website without expecting that a back link will be ever published. For example, when you publish a page about search engines, and you discuss Google, it would be natural to place a link to Google. And it would be very naive to expect that Google will return you the favor. Now it is your turn to believe an external website provides terribly useful info, outstanding service or product.
Sometimes, you may face a situation where outgoing links appear on your webpages unintentionally, even without your knowledge. This happens if you run a blog or forum, and it is not properly configured allowing visitors to leave messages or comments containing external links. You need to be cautious about this, as from my experience, spammers are very fast in finding such websites, and very soon your pages will look like garbage bin…
Reciprocal links
These are links which are present on two different websites and pointing to each of them. Usually they are created within a reciprocal link building campaign and often represent a major share of the total number of links in your website. Google says that Reciprocal Exchange can be viewed as manipulation of SERP and can be seen as violation of Webmaster Guidelines. So it is your good judgement to make sure that your exchange is not regarded as manipulation.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
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