'Link exchange' or 'reciprocal linking' has never being proven to be good for your positioning in search engine results. It also has never to be bad either!! There are thousands of SEO gurus out there and none of them can give a precise answer to wheather it is a good practice or not.
It depends on your marketing strategy! You can do your own research and decide for yourself, and your business, if you should do it or not; my opinion is that exchanging links is not just about ranking!
I want people from the same field I work with (web development) to know that my site exists and can be useful for them. I want, therefore and easy way of asking permition to have my link there on her website and vice-and-versa. This isn't bad and wont harm anyone!
I'm sure you will agree, if you have studyed management, that placing an ad on the back of all cans of Coca-Cola, and having theirs on your product, is a good idea! Or you could build and example from the concept of joint-venture, where 2 or more business share the same resources to boost sales.
So why not having an easy-to-use form on my site people can place links so I can see a network of site, blogs, shops, etc. getting around my virtual space? This is gold man! This is what the internet is about - to me - and I am very happy to present to you my newest application: Mutuo Rich.
Mutuo Rich is webtool that:
Demonstration only. You will receive your own request, once the form is submited, so you can see how it will look like when others use it on your site:
Note: this demo has been created by Thales Jacobi and is available on his weblog http://www.thalesjacobi.com/ and is a good example of how it can work for you as well.
<iframe frameborder="1" scrolling="no" src="http://seo.bubaweb.com/reciprocal-link-form/iframe/exchangeLinksEngine.php?myLink=%3Ca%20href=%22http://www.thalesjacobi.com%22%3EThales%20Jacobi%22s%3C/a%3E%20PHP%20blog%20and%20coding%20resources&to_email=thalesjacobi@gmail.com" style="height:800px;width:455px;"> </iframe>
Parameters explained:
To use the API you will have to POST the following parameters to http://seo.bubaweb.com/reciprocal-link-form/api/exchangeLinksEngine.php:
Using PHP:
$curl= curl_init("http://seo.bubaweb.com/reciprocal-link-form/api/exchangeLinksEngine.php");
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $_POST);
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Thales Jacobi API connection, cURL code from personal blog');
$xml=curl_exec ($curl);
$parser=simplexml_load_string($xml);
if($parser->message){ echo $parser->message."<br /><br />"; }
echo "<div><a href=\"http://seo.bubaweb.com/reciprocal-link-form/iframe/exchangeLinksEngine.php?myLink=".urlencode($_GET['myLink'])."&to_email=".urlencode($_GET['to_email']).($_GET['hidden_action']?"&hidden_action=true":"")."\">Submit another link!</a></div>";
- Cookies - Validation (although main issues were covered)