Are Reciprocal Links Bad

The short answer is yes, but only if you have too many of them and they are in the wrong places.

Search engines like natural linking. The idea is that if you have a quality website with quality content other sites will link to yours naturally.

If a large percentage of your inbound links are reciprocal, this can be viewed as artificially building links just for the sake of building links.

Reciprocal link building guidelines
♦ Link to quality sites that are topically related
♦ Request links in content related to your niche, not on link pages
♦ Use high demand anchor text for the links
♦ Vary the anchor text as you build new links
♦ Newer sites should concentrate on long tail keyphrases