The way to link - January 25th, 2006
It is known by almost everyone in the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) world that gaining links to your website is very important in terms of gaining a good position within the natural listings of the search engines. For those of you that practice link management campaigns, you will know that it is a tedious and monotonous task acquiring links manually as you have to spend so much time finding the right sites to get a link from and then you need to contact the webmasters of those sites.
These days many people are cheating the process of link building by participating in automated reciprocal linking campaigns, where in most cases, a piece of code is added to the websites involved and links are either gradually added over time or in large chunks. Other reciprocal link exchanges such as Link Metro, allow you to add your website to their directory with the ability to send requests for a link exchange with the huge number of participants. There is no automated code for you to put on your site. You just need to place a link on your site to the site you are requesting a link from and then wait for a reply.
Google has come to really disregard reciprocal links simply because they are not natural. They are in a way another spam tactic that black hat SEO’s use to trick the search engines.
Another method of acquiring links is to purchase them from high Page Rank websites, which are often very expensive, but if the right website is selected i.e. it is not just of a high Page Rank but it is also highly relevant to your industry, then this link will likely be worth 100 links from sites within an automated reciprocal link program.
Article submissions are a fairly new method of link building and probably one of the best. Basically, the idea is to write a 200-300 word article on a subject which closely relates to your websites main keywords. Make sure that you include a link to your website somewhere within the article, and then post it to one of the many article submission websites. These websites allow you download articles which other people have created to be published on your own website. They allow you add new articles to your site on a daily basis as long as you keep the link to the author within the article text. If you write a good enough article, you will find that many people will want to post your article on their own website, which consequently increase the links to your website as your name and link will be associated with the article.
One of the newest forms of link building is by three-way linking (triangular linking), which in a way is pretty much the same as reciprocal linking apart from the addition of one more website. If you have websites A, B and C, the way it works is by A linking to B, B links to C and C links to A.
Of all the methods mentioned above, the one Google favours the most is natural link building where websites receive links from just being a high quality website. No automation is used. One website just links to the other because it feels it will be relevant for the visitor.
Ben Ashton
Senior SEO Consultant
