Why Use Three Way Links?

t is no secret in the online world that in order to get a high profile for your site and for lots of new people to see it, it has to have lots of links pointing at it from other sites that are seen as valuable by search engines.

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.

This isn’t a great way of doing things any more because search engines like to see that your site is gaining links as natural votes of quality from other websites, however if sites are linking back and forth to one another, then search engines can conclude that there has been a agreement made in order to try and move up the search engine rankings faster, and so the link is unnatural.

Although these links aren’t worth a great deal, they are worth something and should not be completely disregarded, but the only time that these reciprocal links are really worth having is when the sites themes are related to each other, like a shop and supplier for example.

So from this we can conclude that one way links are the preferred method of linking, but people aren’t all that likely to link to you just because you ask them nicely, you will have to offer them something in return. This is where three way linking comes into play. For three way linking, either you or the other party needs to have more than one site, for this example, well say you have two sites.

The 3 way link model is essentially this: site a places a link to site b, site b then places a link to site c, and if you want to, site c can then link back to site a. This method creates unprompted one way links in the eyes of the search engines that appear completely natural, and therefore will be more valuable.

For example, say you owned site A and site C and you wanted to get a link for site C, you would simply use site A as somewhere to offer a link from and in exchange, the other person would link to site C, meaning that their site becomes site B in the model. This strategy will do you far more favours than reciprocal linking, but when used alone you will probably make fairly slow progress, however when you use it alongside some other methods (which I will go into in my next article) it is highly effective.