Just recently I’ve been browsing the SEO related roles over at monster. You never know, Google may start using them to recruit guys like me!

Anyhow, I’ve noticed something alarming amongst the job Specs. A repeated requirement for the “Understanding of three way linking”. You’ll never hear any seasoned SEO/SEM adopting three way linking as a viable model for the long term success of any given site for one simple reason that I’ll detail below.

For some time reciprocal linking was the easiest method of increasing a sites link count and subsequently its search engine positioning. It was easy, fire out lots of emails offering to trade links with other sites. Both sites link counts go up and everyone’s a winner.

At least they were until the end of 2005. You see Google frowns upon any link building practices that artificially manipulate its search results. The whole premise of Google’s search technology is that sites that have attracted inbound links through merit are rewarded with higher rankings. When the big “G” realised that webmasters were using reciprocal linking to generate 100’s and often 1000’s of inbound links they decided to act.

The Jagger update massively devalued reciprocal links overnight. Sites that had been sitting pretty in top 3 three slots off the back of their reciprocal linking campaigns vanished into the Google Abyss whilst sites with more natural link profiles catapulted to the top to take their place.

Rather than accept that to truly succeed you need to play by Google’s rules webmasters scrambled to find an alternative to reciprocal linking. Three way linking was born.

I won’t rely on three way linking when link building, why? because it’s only a matter of time before Google figures out how to recognise three way link programs and tweaks it’s algorithms accordingly. I’d rather not be one of the SEO’s explaining to clients why their site has plummeted overnight. No Thanks!

As such, if you’re currently relying on three way linking to bolster your rankings your site is already a ticking time bomb.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under seo-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.