Its a well known fact in the Internet marketing community that you need lots of links pointing at your website if you want to get it seen by search engine users, which in this day and age, are pretty much all Internet users.

Several different methods of gathering links exist and some are more effective than others. One of the older, less effective methods which strangely some people seem to favour is reciprocal linking. This is the simplest type of linking and basically involves two websites which have links on them pointing to each other.

The reason that these links aren’t worth a great deal anymore is because what search engines like Google like to see is links building naturally as more and more people find your site, but if sites are both linking to each other, then the search engine can see that an arrangement has taken place to try to gain links faster, and therefore the links aren’t 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.

So clearly what the search engines are now looking for is natural links that have been placed without the recipient directly linking back, so three way links came to one of the more preferred methods. However in order to make these links work, either the site owner that you’re exchanging links with or you have to own at least 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.

E.g. if you owned sites a and c and you wanted to get a one way link for site c using three way linking, you find someone who is prepared to exchange links and offer them a link on site a. You would then get them to link to site c making them site b in the model. Although this is one of the most efficient linking strategies, unless you combine it with a couple of other methods (which Ill go into in my next article) then you’ll probably find it makes fairly slow progress.