t is no secret in the online world that in order to get a high profile for your site and for lots of new people to see it, it has to have lots of links pointing at it from other sites that are seen as valuable by search engines.

Links can be gathered using many different methods and some are worth more than others. One of the least effective ways of building links is reciprocal linking which is where two sites simply exchange links with one another. This method was effective once upon a time but its day has been and gone now.

The reason that these links aren’t worth a great deal anymore is because what search engines like Google like to see is links building naturally as more and more people find your site, but if sites are both linking to each other, then the search engine can see that an arrangement has taken place to try to gain links faster, and therefore the links aren’t natural.

These links are not completely worthless though. They still have some value because sometimes it would be natural for two sites to links to each other, like a shop and their supplier. This would probably however be worth more than any old reciprocal link because the websites would most likely have similar themes; therefore the links would be valued higher than two relatively random sites linking to each other.

One way links are therefore the links that are preferred method, but you will still have to give people something in return for them to give you a link without you linking back. And so 3 way links were born, but in order to make 3 way links work, either you, or the person you’re linking with has to have two sites.

The three-way-linking model goes like this: site A links to site B which then links to site C, which if desired can then link back to site A. Because no site is directly linking back to the site it got a link from, therefore they all look completely natural in the eyes of a search engine. Everybody wins.

For example, say you owned site A and site C and you wanted to get a link for site C, you would simply use site A as somewhere to offer a link from and in exchange, the other person would link to site C, meaning that their site becomes site B in the model. This strategy will do you far more favours than reciprocal linking, but when used alone you will probably make fairly slow progress, however when you use it alongside some other methods (which I will go into in my next article) it is highly effective.