Hi Ray,

Organic backlinks are important to ranking because of the way they are formed, not just because they exist. They tell the search engine that your content is useful and engaging to readers, enough to be quoted with a link.

I think the only way this request of yours might work without repercussion, is if bloggers formed genuine communities of interest around a topic, read each other's posts, and quoted those that were relevant to their own posts with links. And maybe if you like the stye and content of each other's work, you guest post? Does this seem organic to you?

But... the wrong way to go about this, would be an excessive link exchange, without any regard for the quality or relevance of the content being linked. Google has a way of sniffing out this kind of activity, and has said this is a violation of its webmaster guidelines, which will be penalised with dropped rankings.

These are my concerns, although there are bloggers who may feel indifferent to these, or perhaps have even benefited from link exchanges?