There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?
What are one-way links?
A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn’t link back to your website then it’s a one-way link from your site to their site.
What are reciprocal links?
A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you.
That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.
What are three-way links?
Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don’t help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That’s why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.
Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?
Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other.
It’s important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won’t count much. However, that’s also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.
It doesn’t matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won’t.