Those who want to do three way links do it because it makes sense to get one-way links to a site. Seems innocent enough at the start, because everyone is getting a one-way link, but what I see people overlooking is the distinct advantage the person who initiates the link exchange is getting. The typical 3-way linker will realize quickly they need a strategy. They are not randomly doing 3-way link exchanges, they are focusing the PR to their top sites. These sites are NOT giving off very much links to others at all. This is so they don’t split PR, and all the PR they gain from your link stays within their home page and interior pages of their top sites pushing them up the ranks.
For example: Let’s say I have the site: casino.com and it’s my #1 site. Clearly this make sense for me to have all incoming 3-way link exchanges come into this site.
Now, I have to give a link in return. The link I will give you, is picked out of my 258 other sites I own — and likely I will pick a site that I don’t update very often anymore, but one that has PR, due to its age, or previous linking, etc..
I will link to you from there. This site will not grow, will not gain PR, will not be updated, it will basically become a link mule. Now this can happen more or less in any fashion or degree. The smart 3-way linker will try its best to make the links on this page nice. They may give you what you want, inline links, banners, more than one link in exchange for just one of yours, etc…
The link you receive may look nice at first, but as time goes on, without the webmaster updating, adding links, etc to this site, the PR will drop and value decrease. Especially if they go on doing three way links with the “mule” site delivering links to the victims of the exchange thus making the PR passing weaker and weaker and weaker.
Can three-way linking be good? – sure! one easy way to detect if the webmaster is trying to game you, or make an even exchange could be to try and reverse the 3-way link. Ask them to link to your site, from the one they are asking you to link to, and tell them you will link to the site they are planning to link to you from. You will likely see some resistance, this is further evidence to my theory. It’s not flawless. There are honest people doing this too and this note is not directed at you.
Moral of the story – Beware, be careful, do it only with your friends: yes it can be a worthy deal, but make sure it is, because if its not, its the opposite…. a drain on your PR, and not much in return.
Entireweb just emailed a newsletter to me which is all about linking. Some webpages noticed a drop in pagerank the last few months this is because Google is now valuating your site for BAD neighbourhood linking and 3 WAY linking. After reading this I was a bit angry because getting links and putting them online is hard work and Google just ignores your hard work if you do not follow it’s rules.
If you want to read this too just PM me and I will forward you the entire newsletter.
Best Regards
Rick
Itay
the sooner Google focusses more on content instead of links the better
Google has no chance of assessing the quality of any content without using a highly sophisticated natural language analysis system. There are no such systems available in the commercial environment.
So, Google could only take the quantity of a content into consideration, which would make no sense at all. Their focus on link is, therefore, quite logical.
Nandakishore
Online Casino Newsroom
Hi,
I’m a bit confused here are you saying that all linking out is bad and especially linking out to bad sites? What would you define as a bad site? Bad with content or bad with low PR, becasue low PR could also mean its a new site.
Linking to bad sites means linking to sites that are spammy or irrelevant. Supposedly its better to have better quality links than quantity but I can guarantee that if I went a purchased a few year old expired domain from tdnam, scraped some content, set up my link injection script and started spamming thousands of links a day, I would have quite a few top 10 listings in google within a week or two. Sure my domain would be banned by google within a couple months but thats not the point. Google has some serious flaws in their algorithm.
I’m a bit confused here are you saying that all linking out is bad and especially linking out to bad sites? What would you define as a bad site? Bad with content or bad with low PR, becasue low PR could also mean its a new site.
If you have a good site and a fair traffic then Google will find you.
Nevertheless, I have to say that Google seems now like the old giant form Redmond – God to giant companies and bad to small businesses [FONT="]
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