Reciprocal Linking – Dead or Alive?

I have been reading some articles on the state of reciprocal linking. It seems that some people think that the latest Google update has to do with filtering out artificial linking. A visit to Matt Cutts blog revels that Google is going to be aggressively targeting linking schemes. Whether it is reciprocating links, link farming or purchasing links he didn’t say but it seems to me that moderation in anything one does with their website should be the key.

I have another site that contains approximately 60 pages of links that were all part of a reciprocated linking campaign. Now I can’t say whether or not my site has been affected by this latest update but I can say this, all 50+ pages of links still maintain a PR2 rating. If Google is filtering out those links it doesn’t appear that they are assessing any penalties for these reciprocated links pages as they are all still being indexed and are maintaining their page rank.

So if Google isn’t bestowing any weight to these reciprocated links it would appear that the other search engines still are. The site I am talking about and all of my other sites that participate in reciprocating linking, are all doing quite well for their targeted linking text in the other search engines. To me this says that reciprocal linking my not actually work for Google any more but they seem to be working for Yahoo and MSN still. Until reciprocal linking stops working for all search engines then this type of linking remains viable in my opinion.