Link Building Methods, Link Popularity, Backlinks

Reciprocal links are a mutual agreement between two websites to link to each other.

With times gone by and in desparation to build links, webmasters used to link to any theme type of website just to get as many backlinks to their website in an effort to build link popularity.

Eg; my travel theme website links to your bike theme website and your bike website links back to my travel website.

Nowadays, where reciprocal linking is concerned, it has somewhat waned in popularity as webmasters seek other link building strategies for ther websites.

One of the main reasons for this is webmasters not wanting to owe other webmasters and, this also free’s the webmaster to make changes to their site as and when required without having to fulfill any linking arrangement previously made.

Another linking strategy also often used is ‘three way linking’. Webmasters use this method to link as: site 1 links to site 2, site 3 links to site 1.

This became the new type of reciprocal linking. Webmasters found this method of link building to be better than the original reciprocal link as in the eyes of search engines it created a higher value than 2 websites directly linking to each other.

Link farms or automated linking as it is also known is a group of websites that become members of a link service (free or paid). What normally happens here is that the website owner would add a script to their site generated by the link service and in turn, every member (possibly thousands) would automatically link to your website.

Via the link farm strategy you could literally build tens of thousands of links overnight.

Once upon a time this was an interesting method of building links to your website. However, this is now deemed to be one of the more risky and dangerous methods of building links to a site as it is likely it will do more than good.

Search engines cottoned on to this way of building link popularity and it is very likely that any links gained in this way are likely to be discounted by the search engines with your website possibly being penalised.

One way links and text link ads have become very popular in building links to any website. A one way link is simply a link from site 1 linking to site 2 without site 2 linking back. It is in the simplest terms a one direction link and this type of link is now considered to be far more natural to all the major search engines.

An effective way of building one way links is to write unique articles and have them distribute them to article submission websites.

What is important to realise here is that, and as we have stated, the article should be unique so when submitting your article with a author credit link back to your site you should ensure you have made changes to the article itself to ensure that search engines do not discount your article as duplicate content on the web.

You can also build one way links by joining forums. Oftentimes in forums, once you have made enough posts on the forum you are given permissions to add a link or links to your signature, so everytime you start a thread or make a post you will gain a link to your website.

To make your link building more valuable from forums, it is important to join a forum of the same niche as your website giving your links more relevance in search engines as it will contain similar themed content.

There are many many more ways of building links. However, all link building methods we have spoken about above, plus other methods, we will review in greater detail with more information and resources in our coming posts.