Linking and being linked? Does it make sense? – Reciprocal linking

Does it make sense to link websites and being linked by others? Nowadays most of the links are created via software i.e. you can be linked even if your website has never been visited once. Many links are provided “automatically” but they are of a very poor quality. Webmasters initially wanted to provide links to visitors as a resource, advising on good websites to visit next. Today, in many cases thousands and thousands of websites are online just to get money from Google Adsense, Zanox, Tradedoubler, Yahoo Ouverture, and other similar advertising affiliation resources. Another reason to look for being linked or doing “link exchange” is to get an high “PageRank” from search engines. Link exchange could be very useful as resource for both sites if they have a correlation, however more and more frequently reciprocal links are useless since they frequently are not adding value to the visitors of both linked websites. But search engines while consider of low value the reciprocal linking, consider higher the one-way links instead. For this reason who is looking for getting an high grade and high rank on search engines use sometime a triangle links method that means that Web-A links Web-B that links Web-C that links Web, or other similar schemes that are a little more complex. Does it make sense to link websites and being linked by others by reciprocal linking or similar methods? Every time a search engines expert find a way to trick a search engines, there is a search engines guru that finds a way to eliminate the effect of the trick. The google dance. How to increase the popularity, the page rank then? I would suggest to forget of all the tricky techniques that are never giving a real advantage. I strongly suggest to work and focus on the website content to provide a good content that makes your website linked by others because of the value of the content. Good and valuable website content and good online reputation will make your website linked on a long term perspective and will consistently increase your page rank and web popularity.