his title looks like a rip off of another recent article
http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/...opularity.html
reciprocal links still work some and Google is not very good at filtering out purchased links. as they get better at filtering out these types of ranking manipulation the techniques used to manipulate rankings will get more advanced.
I can tell you some of his information is 100% incorrect. for example, he states " Some even emphasize meta tags which haven't been used by search engines in nearly 4 years. "
yet in an interview earlier this year
http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/april_2004.html
Jon Glick (Yahoo!'s Senior Manager for Web Search) stated exactly how they use the meta tags.