Backlinks are very important to rank better in the competition. Thousands of webmasters participate in link building activities like forum link building, cross-linking, spamming and paid backlinks. And we all know how Google penalizes these websites. Almost everyone is aware of Google Penguin. So link building has become very difficult these days. As a solution to this, webmasters are following three way linking. It is comparatively safer way of building backlinks.
What is Three Way Linking?
Let’s consider three websites – website 1, website 2 and website 3. In three way linking, website 1 links to website 2, website 2 links to website 3 and website 3 links to website 1. So it is like a circuit of links. The goal of doing so is to link all the websites in a network; but without cross-linking. No two websites link each other directly. So, they stay safe from cross-linking penalties. This also helps conserving the link juice within the website network.
Benefits of 3 way linking
Assume you and your friends run a blog network. There are around 50 different blogs. Obviously, you all will want to flow the traffic and link juice through all your blogs. For that you will link each other’s blog. These are called cross links or reciprocal links. And it is two-way link building. But Google and other search engines don’t take this in normal way. You may see traffic drop instead of increase. You might also get penalized if the number of websites is higher.
To overcome this, webmasters have developed a new way of link building. And it is three way link building. There can be 3 individual websites, groups or a huge network of websites. Usually in a network, the websites are hosted on servers at different locations. This promotes geo-diversity in the network. This helps ranking better and search engines not detecting link trading easily.
Problems with three way linking
Unnatural links
Even if they are not cross-links, they are still artificial links. The only convenience of them is to manipulate the natural flow of link juice and hence search results. Google has already started detecting this link trade and might take strict action in future.
Worsened user experience
If the websites are not related, their linking doesn’t make much sense. Imagine a fitness related website linking to physics related website. Why will a user looking for fitness tip want to know physics? If there are excessive of such links, they are definitely going to worsen the user experience. Note that user experience is the main key to rank higher.
Link Pages
Some webmasters try not to annoy users. They create a separate page for links. Then put a link to that page somewhere on the website. You might have seen websites with pages like ‘Our Friends’, ‘Our Partners’ etc. These pages are nothing but link lists. When you visit the page, you find only links with keywords. This is totally useless for users. But it prevents showing lots of links on the actual Web Pages.
However, search engines don’t like such pages. Because the pages contain only outbound links. No useful content is there. These pages themselves can’t get enough importance. How will they pass link juice and all?
Source: Tricksbag
