Which Link Yields Higher Search Engine Rankings?
There are three types of links in a blog or website and it is often debated which one helps in ranking our site in search engines. Which one will yield a higher search ranking or does it really help at all for our site to appear in search?
Three Types of Links
One way link
This is a basic link wherein you cite a website in your post and the site doesn’t link back to you. For example, we are linking wikipedia for an article on hyperlinks. Wikipedia doesn’t link back to us so we created a one way link.
Two way or Reciprocal link
This refers to mutual linking of sites. This type of link help each other out in terms of traffic. Most often, bloggers of the same niche or category request each other to exchange links thus gaining more exposure. For example, blogrolls found on personal blogs are almost always placed there with an exchanged link from the other bloggers featured on the roll.
Three way Link
This is believed to be the most effective of all links if we are to listen to webmasters. Most webmasters think that one way link isn’t any good but so is the reciprocal link so they formulated the three way link concept.
This means that website 1 links to website 2, website 2 links to website 3 and website 3 links to website 1- completing the three way linking.
What do we think?
We don ‘t believe that three way linking is the best strategy in yielding higher search engine rankings. Sure it helps but so are the other types of link. We think all are equal and that reciprocal linking is only slightly better.
The most important thing to consider is that good inbound links are the links that will definitely help in getting higher search engine results. The bottomline is that careful consideration should be exercised when linking with other sites. Let us not be in the habit of exchanging links to anybody who asks or to any website we come across just to get a link. Links to our website should be related or within the same topic, niche or category to get better ranking.
If a reciprocal link is linked to a forgettable page then ‘forget’ about it. A one way or three way link that is linked to a low quality content is just as forgettable and would do us no good. Simply remember, links from high quality websites will greatly help in search engine rankings and links from trashy or low quality sites won’t. © 2007
