Do Blog Links Offer Any Real Value?

Google has recently revised and refined its link-weighting algorithms. More people working at Google's are quality control linking experts with the job of making sure links are of value. This means that undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link sellers and exchangers to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

This dosn't kill the value of recriprocal links and if your links are there because they add value to the site visitor, they are good—even if they happen to be reciprocal. So if If a related site, especially an authority site, writes an article and links to your site, and then you link back to reference the AUTHORITY SITE, then don't worry about it. This is normal reciprocal linking behavior and Google expects it.

BUT if your reciprocal links are in fact for nothing other than artificially increasing link popularity and PageRank, then you time and money acquiring that link. You may also have also painted a target on your site telling Google to be wary of ever ranking your pages in the first page of the search results. Beware of any strategy that suggests you should join a network of sites or content exchange system because these strategies are way too easily detectable by Google no matter what the others are telling you.

Link Baiting and TrackBacks

On Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO blog, this is what he says and he works for Google so he should know!
"… I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you." The point is that you can get links from others by pointing out something that your sites have in common, especially if they allow comments on their blog via TrackBack comments.
[tags]blog links, blogging, linking from blogs, linkbaiting[/tags]