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The current trend, put simply, would answer Yes.

The search engines are favoring popular links. Meaning the more links to one site, the more popular that site is and therefore should rank higher within the search engines. This is this argument that many webmasters believe and 'one way link' farms are claiming.

However, we found one important floor in this issue. Many web sites link to each other because it makes good business sense to do so. If the search engines were to penalize these sites, they could be eliminating quality web sites simply because they think that the reciprocal links were ill-formed.

Why would the Search Engines want to exclude quality web sites?

They don't!?

Although it is true that many reciprocal links are SEO tactics and webmasters manipulating the system. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Google claims to have indexed over 8 billion pages, and I'm sure that it's the grand link campaigns and reciprocal linking on the internet that helped them find a few of those 'billion pages'.

'Quality' and 'relevance' is important for search engines and they can determine this by a number of measures

'Comparing themes of the link source and link destination pages

'Placement of links on the page (i.e. is it in body content, ad section, navigation area, etc.)

'Relatedness of the two linked sites (are they in compatible industries?)

These three measures alone will provide a far greater measure of the quality of a link than looking at whether a link is reciprocated or not.

So, could this work for 'one way' links?

Well possibly . . . if the theme and content of the linking sites are related to your site.

If you're buying 'one way' links from a link farm, are they managing this for you?

Who's 'vetting' the links?

and how can you check this?

If the link is coming from a 'bad neighborhood', then that web site could be banned by the search engines and the link to your site is worthless!!

Can you check the quality of the incoming links?

'One way' linking can not easily answer that question.

Reciprocal linking can confidently answer YES. The webmaster is in control of who does and who doesn't link. Link management services like the www.intiallinks.com make this process very easy. The service is free and all members and web sites are vetted by human editors to ensure quality linking and the exclusion of bad neighborhoods. All members have one thing in common - they all want to exchange links with other quality web sites, and initiallinks.com ensures that.

In regards to links, and SEO in general, we don't believe it makes much sense for search engines to look for ways to penalize those who are manipulating the system to their advantage, but rather to make sure that those manipulations work to provide higher-quality search results. Only reciprocal linking can give that control to the webmaster.