Recip links don't appear to be holding as much weight lately.
have you ever had code generated and found hidden links in the output? does that actually help the person who is getting linked to unintentionally if the link is only a period with a <a href> to make it a link? how weighty is text? do they care about the fact that you have a link or does text matter?
the text is very important. the main way a link won't work is if its redirected. the sneaky webmaster will set up a link to go to a scripty like jump.cgi. then he will disallow the spiders from indexing the page in robots.txt that way he can hoard the pagerank while pretending to be a link partner type. but if the text is visible like you describe it should count fine.
