Introduction to Methods of website linking

Reciprocal link

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob's website links to Alice's website, and Alice's website links to Bob's website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.

Relevant linking

Relevant linking is a derivative of reciprocal linking in which a site linked to another site contains only content compatible and relevant to the linked site. Relevant linking has become increasingly important because most major search engines stress that -- in Google's words -- "quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating."[1].

The engines' insistence on reciprocal links being relevant developed because many of the methods described below -- free-for-all linking, link doping, incestuous linking, overlinking, multi-way linking -- and other schemes were designed to unethically "fool" search-engines into awarding undeservedly high page ranks and/or return positions to sites engaged in search-engine spamming.

Though the engines warned site developers (again quoting from Google) to avoid "'free-for-all' links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines (because) these are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive [2]" they also took proactive steps to recognize linking schemes and downrate or de-index sites using them.

This, in turn, led to the development of search-engine compliant link-management systems enabling webmasters to benefit from the upside of reciprocal linking without putting themselves and their sites at risk from inadvertently straying over into the darkside.

Since many linking schemes -- particularly those involving some form of link farming or free-for-all linking -- were (and still are) based on variations of a 1999 patent [3]for an automated system of gathering links and adding them to a website without the possibility of editorial direction or intervention, development of a solution based on a polar opposite approach became highly desirable.

In 2006, after six years of evaluating the company's application and its underlying editor-based technology for acquiring and managing links, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Creative Net Ventures of Atlanta patent #7,082,470 [4] for its LinksManager application.

To date, the LinksManager system remains the only proprietary, patented, semi-automatic link-exchange enabler to comply with all major search-engine quality guidelines and Web best practices standards.

Three way linking
See also: Webring

Three way linking (siteA ⇒ siteB ⇒ siteC ⇒ siteA) is a special type of reciprocal linking. The attempt of this link building method is to create more "natural" links in the eyes of search engines. The value of links by three-way linking can then be better than normal reciprocal links, which are usually done between two domains.

Two-Way-Linking[Link exchange]

An alternative to the automated linking above is a link exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review.

One-way linking

One-way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link goes "one-way" in direction. It is suspected by many industry consultants[who?] that this type of link would be considered more natural in the eyes of search engines. One-way links are also called Incoming Links or Inbound Links.

An effective way to build this type of one-way linking is by distributing articles through content sites and article directories. These articles generally contain an About The Author box that contains a one-way link back to the author's URL. When publishers use these articles, those one-way links help authors increase their page rank.

The justification for link farm-influenced crawling diminished proportionately as the search engines expanded their capacities to index more sites. Once the 500-million listing threshold was crossed, link farms became unnecessary for helping sites stay in primary indexes. Inktomi's technology, now a part of Yahoo!, now indexes billions of Web pages and uses them to offer its search results.

Where link weighting is still believed by some Webmasters to influence search engine results with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask (among others), link farms remain a popular tool for increasing PageRank or perceived equivalent values. PageRank-like measurements apply only to the individual pages being linked to (typically the reciprocal linking pages on member sites), so these pages must in turn link out to other pages (such as the main index pages of the member sites) in order for the link weighting to help.

The expression "link farm" has always carried with it a derogative reputation. Many reciprocal link management service operators tout the value of their resource management and direct networking relationship building. The reciprocal link management services promote their industry as an alternative to search engines for finding and attracting visitors to Web sites. Their acceptance is by no means universal but the link management services seem to have established a stable customer base.