Reciprocal links page is good or bad?

Settle an argument for me

[Crush]

I am having an argument with my brother. I want a links page and he wants to keep our site "clean".

I beleive if you have a links page made in a directory style it will not get page rank 0.

My brother on the other hand wants to get sites to link to our "clean" site and we reciprocate from a site we have with a links page. He thinks that judgement day is coming for those who have links pages.

I agree the second is safer but the problem is people think we are pulling a fast one on them and generally refuse to link back.

As our sites is in the travel industry it is extremely competitive and our competition has got in some cases 1000's of back links.

What would you do?

[dirkz]

Just my 2 cents for this discussion: For one thing I strongly believe that it is possible for an algo to determine some topics, at least you can collect the set of keywords and compare them to sets from human-chosen sites, and Google has already some factors worked in that depend on the manually choosing of important sites (imagine ODP, whose weight comes solely from Google having dubbed it "important").

As for the second thing, I think Google won't ever be able to penalize you for a link from an arbitrary site. If it would, everyone could bring his or her competitors to a PR0 in no time. The exceptions are of course link farms, where it is crystal clear that the site owner paid for it and thus is responsible for the link. I think Google will at best be able to ingore them, like guestbook links.

[SlyOldDog]

Hi Dirk

>> For one thing I strongly believe that it is possible for an algo to determine some topics,

No question about that. Look at Google News. The context checking works a treat.

>>As for the second thing, I think Google won't ever be able to penalize you for a link from an arbitrary site

Agreed. But it's who you link TO that's the problem. If you have a links page full of crap, Google might decide you are crap too.