Thanks for your generous sharing of your experience. I didn’t realize that press releases actually were stronger than articles and thought it was the other way around. Also I didn’t realize that you shouldn’t post articles on your web site and content on the article banks as it would devalue your own website’s ranking.

Thanks again.

Whether or not a site will actually be banned in this day and age for three ways is unknown, I would assume it is not likely and more likely to be a devalued exchange since no Search Engine states that this method should not be used, let me know in the comments if I missed this somewhere.

Ok, grammar and run on sentences aside…

Three way link exchanges originated as and continue to be an effort to hide linking patterns from the search engines. The original thought process behind them was:

1) Google looks for unnatural linking patterns.
2) Reciprocals would be easy to spot.
3) If we do 3-way exchanges they will therefore be harder to spot (which, btw, is not true).

This would fit exactly with what Google would have been talking about here:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.

It is the very nature of trying to hide what you are doing that allows it to be classified as a “scheme”.

Also, just so you know, MSN did in fact ban one of my websites for reciprocal linking, and told me straight out that was why:

As we’ve stated before, your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content in an attempt to increase your ranking. These links are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Personally, I think that it is a bit arrogant of them to decide for me who I can or cannot link out to.