One Way, Two Way and Three Way Linking

Posted in Internet Marketing, Off Site Marketing on August 26th, 2008 | one response

There is alot of talk between web masters and search engine specialists about links and its benefits towards search engine rankings.

The subject can get wildy out of hand and complicated so I just wanted to tell you the difference between the 3 main linking methods most widely used on the internet.

One Way Links
A one way link is what it says, one way. It is a link that is one site that points back to another site.

For example: SITE A has a link to SITE B.

Note: Another way to say it would be to say that SITE A has an “Outgoing” One way link to SITE B and SITE B has an “Incoming” One way link from SITE A.

Two Way Links (more commonly known as Reciprocal Links)
Again, simple stuff. A reciprocal link is when one site puts a link on their site and the other site “reciprocates” by putting a link back to the first site. Kind of like, “you scratch my back and I will scratch yours”.

For example: SITE A links to SITE B and SITE B links to SITE A.

Three Way Links
This is slightly more complicated and is actually a combination of One and Two Way links and involves three (or more) web sites all INDIRECTLY linking to each other.

For example: Lets say we have 3 web sites. SITE A, SITE B and SITE C. SITE A will do a one way link to SITE B, SITE B will make a one way link to C and SITE C will make a one way link to SITE A.

So which linking method is best for you?

I will shortly publish in depth articles on all 3 linking methods because there is alot more to just linking, but if I was to quickly summarise which linking method is best for ME, then it would look like this.

Incoming One Way Links
The best! One way links rule! One way links are hard to get but when they are got, just watch your site burn through to the top of the rankings.

Outgoing One Way Links
This is like Incoming One Way links but in reverse. Only the site that receives the link gets the benefit.Try not to give away any One Way links. Treat them as gold.

Reciprocal Links
They are okay if you have alot of difficulty getting Incoming One way links but this method involves you having to put in a lot of work to manage them because there is ALOT of reciprocal link fraud.

Three Way Links
These are also a great way to get Incoming One way links but again, like reciprocal linking you have to spend alot of time making sure everyone keeps their promise of maintaining links where they say they do.