3 way linking: A surefire Kamikaze SEO strategy
March 29, 2006 – 9:42 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
If you’re on the internet for any length of time, you’ll receive an email request along these lines:
“Hello, I see you website and find it quality. I link you already from abc.com/link
Now you link back me fast, okay at xyc.com …ok dokie over out?”
My advice in this situation is to pass. Now I’m a fan of a threeway as much as the next person, but this is one menage a trois you need to avoid! When you transact a three-way link scheme, you’re making it clear that your main purpose for trading links is to attempt to fool the search engine algo into thinking you’re more popular than you really are.
Some background information on the situation
The reason that threeway linking came into vogue is based on the notion that a one-way link is more indicative of a website’s quality than a reciprocated link is.
This makes sense. A website with a lot of merit will receive links from admiring webmasters who are not looking for anything in return. They’re simply nodding in approval at the great job done by the webmaster, and they link to the website in the hope that it helps their visitors. This is the lost meaning of the term “one-way link“.
What happened next is the meaning got someone twisted, mostly by legend, and somewhat in the plain telling of the story. But now the meaning of one-way links means: A link that appears to go to my website without anything offered in return, but in reality is linked back from another domain or web page I control.
While will manufacturing one-way links by three-way linking sentence my website to a firey death in the Bowels of Search Engine Hell?
Easy. Because it’s programmatically easy to see what you’re doing. And, and this is a big and, it’s a sign of an untenable position concerning your tactics. What possible explanation, however meagerly plausible it may be, could you offer to the question: why are you linking back from xyc.com to link partners who are linking to abc.com. What possible benefit does this carry for human visitors to your website?
These two factors combined make this 3 way linking tactic the plastic explosives hauling sector of the SEO business. Sure, you might make a few bucks for a short while, but in the end you’ll be missing limbs. I’ll return to this subject of link strategies in a coming post, but until then, all the best.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.
