Difference between Reciprocal and Inbound link building.

Reciprocal link building

Reciprocal link building is popularly known as link exchange. Webmasters would exchange links with each other in a hope to attract traffic. When Google introduced the concept of PageRank, which treated links as a vote or endorsement which in turn affected a website’s ranking in natural search engine results, link exchange became even more popular.
With time, many webmasters started exchanging links purely to influence website rankings in search engines. Search engines are said to be observing reciprocal link building as artificial inflation of links. It has been observed that link exchange has lost its weight–age as far as enhancing website rankings in SERPs is concerned.
None of the research has shown that websites that carry out reciprocal link building are penalized in any way. It has become a process that is much easier than building one–way links (links that are not reciprocated) but one that today has minimal value as far as natural search engine rankings are concerned.

Inbound Link Building

While reciprocal link building involves exchange of links, inbound link building is a process that doesn’t involve exchange of links between two websites. Inbound links are also called one–way links. As the name suggests, one–way linking is building links for the website without reciprocating it.
If Website A receives a link from any webpage of website B without having to give a link back to website B, then this link is an inbound link for website A.