If you're thinking of using 3WayLinks to boost traffic to your site, just make sure you don't come home crying when your rankings vanish in less than two months. Here's where someone made a critical mistake that completely killed his attempts at search engine dominance.

Three way links are links aimed at fooling the search engines. On the web, linking to someone is like a vote of confidence. The more links point to your site, the higher your online credibility.

If you link to someone, and that site also links back to you, that's called a 2-way link. Sometimes, people do that because they each want more incoming links. Who cares if they really liked the content on the other site. All they wanted was the link.

And that affects the way search engines value links, because now those links were just staged and are not sincere expressions of belief in the linked site.

So in comes 3-way links. Site A links to Site B, who then links to Site C, who then links back to Site A. Supposedly, this will make detection harder, and search engines will have a more difficult time determining that these links are just there for search engine points.

Harder, yes. Impossible to detect, no.

A site owner participated in this 3WayLinks program...

...and blogged about. Not just blogged about it, actually. He bragged about it. Online. Complete with screenshots of his Google search engine results.

He wrote something along the lines of: "I ranked #1 for this search term..."

I did a search for the search phrase recently and did not find his site in the first few pages. I also did a "site:" check and found out that Google only listed two pages from his site. And one of the two was listed as a supplemental result.

What happened to his #1 ranking? Poof! It disappeared. In less than two months.

So, is it worth participating in these 3 way link exchange schemes? Not if you're going for an effective long-term strategy for your site's traffic. If you do want a short-lived high ranking throwaway site, however, then 3-way linking can help you achieve your short-term goal.

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"Three Way Links"
First Posted: July 18, 2007 | Filed in: Web Traffic

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