Are Reciprocal Links Bad?

So I have been having a long running debate with some SEO friends of mine regarding reciprocal links. I am aware of many different link managers that provide forms to register with a partner site to get a link (of course they request a reciprocal link in return). For reasons, I just don't understand one of the SEO friends of mine will NEVER do this (even with a high PR6+ site). The reason states is due to reciprocal links. Is there a huge penalty that I am not seeing with reciprocal links? Why would someone want to avoid them like the plague and then again why do so many link managers exist if they are such a horrible thing? Is the link juice from them somehow watered down by Google, Yahoo, and Bing? What are your thoughts? Anybody have a good argument AGAINST reciprocal links?

Yes, they do no good for SEO purposes. They basically count as no backlink.

Is that limited to Google or across all of the big search engines?

You get a lot less "link juice" ... work on 1 way links with high pr in ur niche.

Google definitely doesn't like reciprocal linking, so try to avoid it. And why do you want to do it anyways? One way links are so easy to obtain.

They are not "bad" at all.

Think of it like this: Too much of anything is bad for you.

small_town_boy said:

Yes, they do no good for SEO purposes. They basically count as no backlink.

Click to expand...

Go say that in an adult webmaster forum where everyones running traffic trading scripts that are an advanced form of reciprocal links. You will get laught out of the forum.

There are no penalties, reciprocal links just carry less weight in the ranking algorithm. Within certain niches traffic trading using reciprocal links kicks arse, there are a few large sites doing 1m+ UV/month just thru reciprocal links.

Jcsarokin said:

You get a lot less "link juice" ... work on 1 way links with high pr in ur niche.

Click to expand...

I fully agree. I have some sites I have done split tests with. Same site copied with different backlinks. The sites that are oneway are still at the top of google while the recip site is pages in.

Just my experience with it.