Many experts feel reciprocal links are losing value because search engines can identify "one link in, one link out" link structure of a website so search engines are giving more weight to one way links.

Solution : you link your website to site A, site A links to site B and finally site B links to your site C.

You want proof ? I have a no. 1 position on Yahoo with more then 12 million competing sites :

Check out http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=fun+forward&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt.

While you check my no. 1 position, click on link and enjoy my collection of funny movies and power point presentations.

This is where my introduction ends, now let's talk practical.

I have a rather new site http://www.hartino.com dedicated to "Euro Millions", biggest, lump sum, tax free lottery in world and I want in all major search engines [aol, google, killerinfo, msn, yahoo, etc. ] a no. 1 position.

Google Suggest Beta is a good way to research for relevant key words for your site, in my case I found this data :

euro millions 1,590,000 results euro money 10,900,000 results euro millions results 498,000 results euro millions lottery 76,600 results euro million 4,540,000 results

euromillions 58,400 results euromoney 314,000 results euromillions results 32,400 results euromillion 8,970 results

Recently there has been talk that Google has discounted reciprocal linking as a factor in their ranking algorithm. For webmasters who don't know, reciprocal links are just traded links - web site A links to site B, and site B in exchange links to site A. Often term "linking partner" is used instead of reciprocal link. In past, it seems that reciprocal links have played an important role in how a site is ranked in search results. It was an indicator from webmaster that other site was of value to their visitors.

Once marketers caught on to this, various software was developed that would help automate process. As webmasters started freely swapping links with every other webmaster, this diluted value of having reciprocal links in place. Google caught on to this, and apparently has now downgraded or completely removed this type of linking as a ranking factor.

Should marketers continue to pursue reciprocal links? Are they worthwhile? It probably depends on