Our clients are reporting increasing numbers of 3-way linking offers. We recommend avoiding them.

What Are 3-Way Links?

3-way links are an attempt to address the belief that reciprocal links (you link to me and I link to you) provide less benefit than 1-way inbound links to your web site. There may be some truth to that, but reciprocal linking done properly still provides effective link popularity credit. The 3-way approach typically takes this form:

What’s Wrong With 3-Way Links?

Google has this to say about link schemes (emphasis is ours):

The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

Search engine ranking algorithms are able to detect 3-way linking as an artificial means of boosting the popularity of both sites and may discount the value of these links. We think it’s unlikely to generate an actual penalty, but you may get no value from the incoming link. And based on Google’s statement above, an actual ranking penalty is certainly not out of the question

Some schemes host the sites involved in this approach on different web servers, thinking that will hide this scheme from the search engines, but once they’ve done a few 3-way links the search engines can detect the pattern, regardless of where the web sites are hosted.

It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature … Or the Search Engines

Most people engaging in 3-way linking are doing it with the express intent to manipulate search results. At Rank Magic, our philosophy is that anything done to deceive the search engines is a bad idea that will eventually bite you in the tail. Once the search engines see that you’re playing games to artificially increase your link popularity, they’ll stop counting many of your links; perhaps even some very legitimate ones.

Our Position on 3-Way Links

We never engage in 3-way linking schemes for many reasons. For one, we think it’s unethical, akin to search engine spam. For another, they’re very difficult to control. And for another, they can hurt more than they help in the long run.

Reciprocal linking where two sites link with each other is perfectly acceptable and natural when both sites are relevant for the same topics and visitors. A plumber’s web site that links to a local electrician’s web site is a natural reciprocal link arrangement. A furniture web site that shares links with one of the furniture manufacturers they feature is a natural thing, and often helpful to visitors on both web sites. That’s much more acceptable than 3-way linking schemes and will never get you in trouble.

I’m reprinting an excellent article from Axandra about ensuring that search engines really understand what your web site is all about. It’s easy for poorly constructed inbound links to skew the search engines’ sense of what you’re about. See our tagged posts on GoogleBombing. The following article is copyrighted by Axandra.com – Web site promotion software.

You know what you sell and you know the topic of your website. Are you sure that Google puts your website in the right category? If your website is about shoes, Google still might think that it is about frogs and toads.

Toads

If Google puts your website in the wrong category, it will be very difficult to get high rankings for your keywords.

How to find out what Google thinks about your website

To find out what Google thinks about your website, perform a “similar” search for your domain. Enter the following in Google’s search box:

related:www.domain.com/ ~domain.com

Replace domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no spacer after the colon. On the result page, Google will show you websites that it finds related to your site.

If the websites on the search result page are related to your website then everything is okay. If the websites are about totally different topics, then you have a problem and Google probably won’t display your website in the search results for the right keywords.

Why does Google put your website in the wrong category?

Suppose your website is about selling shoes. If your site is linked by other websites that link to your website and other websites that are about frogs and toads then Google might think that your website is related to frogs and toads.

It’s important that the other links on the web page that links to you are related to your site. If you’re listed in the “Shoes” category of an Internet directory then all web sites in the same category are usually also about shoes.

When search engines look at this page and check the links to other sites they will think that your web site is related to shoes. That means that it will be much easier to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

Is your website in the right co-citation category?

The other websites to which your link partners link influence the ranking of your website on Google.

Here’s an example: web sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 all link to the web sites A, B, C and D. Although A, B, C and D don’t link to each other, Google thinks that A, B, C and D are related to each other because the same web sites link to them:

The effect of co-citation on your rankings

If A, B, C and D are all linked from 1, 2, 3 and 4 they might be related to one another, even though they don’t directly link to each other.

If A, B, C and D are all linked by many other web sites, they have a strong relationship. The more web sites they are linked by, the stronger the relationship.

If you are the owner of website A, you should make sure that web sites B, C and D are related to your site.

What does this mean for your website?

When you build links, make sure that the page that links to your site also contains other links that are related to your website topic. The more pages of the other site are about your topic, the better.

If the link to your website is in a good neighborhood then it will be much easier to get high rankings for your keywords.

Google’s Webmaster Central has a helpful article on best practices for quality link building. Here are a few of the main points we found particularly relevant.

Participate in social networking – forums and blogs, especially if your site is relatively new and/or unknown.

Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others.

Create compelling content.

… think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience.” and “Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way.

Directory listings can be helpful…

but lower quality directories can be avoided as being of limited value. Make sure directories you submit to are on target, moderated, and well structured. And avoid mass directory submission services as they’re “mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.”

Link building is a long term strategy.

It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.

Note that “randomly exchanging links” is not the same thing as reciprocal link building we do for our clients as part of our link building services at Rank Magic. Exchanging links with other web sites that are related to yours and relevant to visitors on your web site are fine, effective ways to gain good incoming links. Avoid reciprocal links with every Tom, Dick or Harry who sends you a spammy linking request via email. Once in a blue moon those may be okay, but most are garbage and won’t help you a bit.

Make it easy for people to bookmark you on social sites.

Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users’ attention.

We typically recommend our clients include a button from AddThis. We have one at the top of the right-hand column of this post. If you participate in any social networking sites (Facebook, Delicious, etc.) we’d love it if you’d use our button to share our blog.