Reciprocal Link Directory/Study

I thought the forum members may be interested in a study into the worth of reciprical links that I am conducting.
Opinion on the various forums is very divided on whether they are worthwhile in improving a sites ranking in the SERPs.
So we thought we would conduct a trial to settle the matter - by creating a directory of sites that wish to participate in reciprocal linking.

The site is www.reciprocal-link-directory.com

The directory has just launched, and as yet has no sites listed. I invite anyone who would like to participate to submit there sites - a reciprocal link is required.

It is planned to regularly post results such as PR and SERP results on the site, so that all who wish may follow the progress.

If you want all your sites banned from the search indexes the best way to do it is to submit to every reciprocal link directory and link back to these "link farms"

there is not wrong with reciprocal links, related site's must be connected somehow and it always will be like that, just don't use this method for BL wrong (if you use just reciprocal links to get BL that is wrong)

yes this is one of the arguments you come across against reciprocal linking. However, I don't believe a site such as reciprocal-link-directory.com falls at all into what is commonly regarded as a link farm ie automated, unthemed pages of links., see:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-29,GGLG:en&oi=defmore&q=define:Link+Farm

These sites are not banned by Google (in fact they are doing quite nicely):
www.linkexchanged.com
PR 5
808 pages listed in Google

www.linkmarket.net
PR 6
2,030 pages listed in Google

Other evidence is that some major players are using reciprocal linking quite extensively
eg http://www.netregistry.com.au/search-engine-optimisation/thetrafficaccelerator.php
also, checkout the "resources" link at the bottom of that page that forwards to http://www.reciprocal-links.netregistry.com.au/

Hence, the reason to conduct this study.

You certainly have a right to state your opinion.

I don't submit to any reciprocal link directories and have many number 1 SERP positions and have never purchased a link from anyone.

Have you seen this or this ?

Secondly if you were to purport to test the value of reciprocals you'd try to control your variables, or at least define them. This to me looks like pretty transparent way to get a jump start on a service.

Seems like some bait and switch, a study to promote a new service to me.

I would not trade a link with a reciprocal link directory (link farm) if they paid me a $1,000.00 a year.

sorry, I'm not really sure at what your getting at here. The 2 links are the queries I did at Google to give the info in my previous post. Don't they back the argument that Google has not banned these sites?

"control your variables" - again not sure what you would like to know here, perhaps I haven't explained what the approach is clearly. It's pretty simple - create a site that, as far as is within our control, has all incoming links reciprocated.
You will notice that I have deliberately avoided creating active links from this forum so that this ideal of all links being reciprocated is maintained. Also, plan to do regular backlink checks, and create reciprocal links back to any sites that may happen to link to the directory. That should keep it pretty pure, reciprocal-wise.

If you see a hole in my thinking here, I'm very open to suggestions.

"a jump start on a service" - nope, afraid you've got it wrong there. It's purely what you see. In fact, I think this would be a pretty dumb way of going about it.

No, I just thought the members of this forum may be interested in following along as it progresses. If those who do participate in reciprocal linking feel that want to exchange links with the site, great! But if they don't, hey, no problem.

If you know where somebody else has actually done this work and published the results, I'ld be very interested. It would save a good deal of work, and the site would be redundant.

I have to agree that I don't see the "expiriment" part. Just reporting back your rankings doesn't take into account the fact that you have content including on page, titles, descriptions etc.

People here would be interested in the results of a true experiment when it came to recips but you haven't set the control correctly. What you have is a recip directory and there are 1000's already out there.

If you were truly interested in an experiment, I would set up a static control site and link back to sites with controled anchor text to truly judge what recips alone do. Otherwise its so cloudy and skewed the info becomes useless.

Hope this helps a bit