I understand that at the last update of the Google search engine its webcrawlers (the software that trawls through the internet indexing pages for subsequent retrieval) have been given new algorithms that detect and "punish" reciprocal linking, especially where it occurs in dedicsted "links pages" or in any case out of context.

So if you have too many links on your website simply listed out of context you could end up getting "blacklisted" by Google...

By all means however, links can and should be added in context.