The good days of links exchange strategy in search engine optimization has gone, and if we do a fast revision about the history of this technique, the life span will look like this:
1- Before 2004 - most webmasters were doing aggressive link exchange, no matter with whom and no matter how much, it is just about numbers, they just care more inbound links to your site even if that results thousands of out bound irrelative links on your site.
2- 2005 was the year of relevancy for webmasters, they started checking how much this website is related to theirs before exchanging link with it, regardless of the quality and unique content that this site has (They still care about numbers of websites)
3- 2006 was the your of relevancy and quality regardless of numbers, most webmaster now tend to exchange links with few websites (May be just 10 websites) have the same theme and contain unique quality content
As the popularity of the blogs (Especially in webmasters related website) increases day by day, and if I am right in my expectation about the future of links exchange, blog roll will be the new generation of links exchange for many reason:
-Blog roll will be shown site wide, so blog owners will be careful a lot before listing any website in their blog roll (They will check the quality and relevancy a lot)
- Blog roll menu has a limited number of websites it can hold (More than 10 you will get ugly look), so any page will not have a big number of outbound links which may reduce the value of the inbound link that counted for you.
- Because Blog roll is site wide, that will give more value to your link (Many webmasters don’t like site wide links but I am sure it is safe in this case)
- Again as Blog roll is site wide and it is shown on all Blog posts (Unlike the links exchange pages those being buried in the site) then you will have a very good potential to get good amount of traffic
- I can see Blog roll as a chance to build a good relation with webmasters in your theme, which may develop to business relationship of partnership
Finally I need to tell all webmasters those have seo blogs with quality content to request being in my blog roll, it will be my pleasure
