Reciprocal Links are links created when Website A links to Website B and Website B links to Website A. Many times these links are exchanged because the webmaster of website A and website B have agreed to exchange links with one another. Usually, what happens is the webmaster of one of the websites finds the other website and likes it. So he/she sends an e-mail to the webmaster of the website asking about exchanging links. This process will be discussed in more detail later in this blog.
From my research it does not appear that Search Engines will penalize you for having links to your website from unrelated websites. If they did, then your competitors could set up unrelated websites and link to all of their competitors to lower their competitors search ranking. However, links from unrelated sites probably don’t help your rankings nearly as much as links from related pages do. Search Engines might penalize your website if they found a huge number of unrelated reciprocal links between websites.
What Search Engines can and appear to do is put a much higher value on links from related websites.
The bottom line is that you want to get links from websites that have quality content, and that are ranked high in the Search Engines for keywords related to your website.
The more quality links you have pointing to your website the higher the quality that Search Engine will perceive your website to be and therefore the higher your website will rank in the Search Engines.
There is talk that reciprocal links are given less value than one way links. While this may be true, reciprocal links still appear to have a major effect on Search Engine rankings. So getting links to your website (even reciprocal links) are very important.