Most people will start their link building campaign by emailing other site owners and asking them to include a link in exchange for one in return. Now this can be very effective in certain circumstances and I have seen sites in which it has been done brilliantly and tons of traffic, and importantly customers, are created. This is the proper link building where site owners of similar sites are effectively advertising on each other’s sites to swap traffic. Any search engine benefits gained are an added bonus.
This is not what most people are doing in link building. Most of the time you are offered a link from within a huge links directory and are expected to offer something similar back.
The next step up is to ask a link building expert to do the work for you and I recently discovered that my own links directories were full of such link swaps. Unfortunately, they are being paid to generate lots of links and don’t really care about being ethical. About a third of all of my links swaps were through the same few SEO experts who had actually not bothered to get me a proper link back. So I removed all of their links. They didn’t mind, but I’m not sure the people who paid them for the work were so pleased.
A lot of website owners try to do the same sort of hiding the links back trick on purpose. They are trying to build one way links. Why would they do that? Links listed in directories have very little power especially when they are uncategorised and full of irrelevant links. Search engines are certainly not daft – they can see that these are links swaps for SEO benefit. Worse still, they can see that every site listed in the links directory links back to the site itself. Put 1 and 1 together and you then see the search engines starting to ignore links directories.
To avoid this a lot of website owners try one way linking, but it’s not easy to get people to link to you for nothing in return. Some people offer to pay for one way text links, but the going cost starts around $30 per link, even more on quality pages. So others tried three way linking, where Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C. In this case, Site A and Site C are owned by the same website owners. But even this is subject to a lot of problems and I doubt search engines will be fooled for long.
What is the solution? I think it is article writing. This produces loads of one way text links quickly and easily, as long as you find a decent publisher.
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