Its well known among the search engine optimisation community, but perhaps not so well known among others that if you want your website to be found by search engines, then you need to have lots of links pointing at it from other websites.
There are many different ways of accumulating links to your site and some are more valuable than others. The traditional method that a lot of people still seem to use is reciprocal linking. This is basically where site A gets in contact with site B and says, Ill give you a link if you give me a link and so they both end up with a link and everyones happy.
Links acquired in this way aren’t worth a great deal anymore. The reason for this is that search engines like to see natural link growth i.e. links placed because someone genuinely appreciates a site and wants to vote for it. However if the other person is linking back, then the search engine will conclude that some kind of mutual agreement has happened with search engines in mind and therefore the link is not entirely natural.
They are however worth something, just not a great deal. The reason they’re still worth something is because sometimes it would be natural for websites to simply link directly to and from each other, like in the case of a shop and their supplier or other situations where the pages have similar themes. Thats really the only time that reciprocal links are worth anything, when the pages are based on similar themes.
One way links are therefore the links that are preferred method, but you will still have to give people something in return for them to give you a link without you linking back. And so 3 way links were born, but in order to make 3 way links work, either you, or the person you’re linking with has to have two sites.
The model of three way linking is basically this; Site A links to Site B which links to Site C which can then link back to Site A. Each site involved then has a one way link pointing at it and because its not reciprocal, the search engines will place higher value on it.
Say for example you own Sites A and C and you were promoting Site C, you would simply use Site A as a place to offer a link from, and when people want to receive a link from Site A, you then get them to link to Site C in return. Their site then becomes Site B in the model. This linking strategy is pretty much win ” win, but you will usually make fairly slow progress if you use this method alone, it is much more beneficial when combined with other methods which I will go into in my next article.
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