I was looking over my emails last night and I came across one of those silly link exchange emails.  You know the ones I am talking about:

It is entirely computer generated where you can see all of those statistics of your website conveniently placed and highlighted in the text.  Further, it gives you a 3 paragraph run-down on how link exchanges are going to help you in the search engines.  In fact, they have already given you a link!  You click on the link and it appears on page 187 of some crazy link farm directory which would NEVER be spidered in a million years.

As you can see, I just LOVE these emails.  But one thing I have noticed is that both these types of emails as well as “legitimate” link exchange requests have significantly dropped over the past year.

Now link farms (those automated link gathering programs) have had limited effectiveness even in its prime and was never really a quality way of generating backlinks.  The general link exchange, though, has had its run!  Recently (early in the year), Google got on its high horse a little bit and punished those sites (particularly blogs) that had paid links on them.

a) I don’t know how they could distinguish a paid link from any other

b) It happened to punish some of us (like myself) that had legitimate links on the site.

Over the past few months, this issue has resolved itself a little bit, but it shows you that search engines, like Google, are taking notice of backlinks on websites and where they come from.

There is also the argument that the reciprocal link cancels itself out.  By linking to each other, the effectiveness of this link weakens or becomes worthless.  Now I personally do not think it is worthless.  A link is a link.  Still, I don’t think it is a very effective strategy to spend your time on.

But we can add a twist to reciprocal linking which CAN have a greater impact on your website.  Three way links are a great way to remove this redundancy in two-way linking.

In this strategy, there is a THIRD website that is present.  You then create a wheel of links which never re-links to a past site.

Yes, Google is aware of this strategy, too, but it is much harder to patrol and ultimately creates more “quality” to the “web” of the internet.  This can be taken a step further in adding 4, 5 or even more websites in the ring.

So the question is “how do you do this easily” and “where do I get this THIRD website”?  That discussion is for my next blog post.  Stay tuned!