I recently have had several conversations with my SEO people, and have discovered through them, and conducting some research through such people like Matt Cutts, and engineer from Google, that link exchange does not have the significant effects on organic Search Engine Optimization we once believed, in fact it may be a detriment to your website.
Google and other search engines are now looking for "one way" linking to your website. It makes your website an authority. Whenever Google sees that quality sites (note the word "quality") are directly linking to you, this is seen as "authority".
When you exchange links with someone, you are not seen as having "authority", you are seen as having a "cooperative". There have been, and still are many companies out there that promote link exchange, however, because it is so easy to exchange links, search engines can see this often as "spamming" links. Which leads to no benefit to you, and may in fact drop you in your organic searches for keywords and phrases.
I say this because recently I have removed my exchange links and have been trying to work with other business to set up one linking. Sometimes it is costly. However, the benefits to my organic ranking have clearly outweighed the cost.
Something to think about.
Linda
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