Is 3 Way Linking Good OR Bad?
I have seen many biased internet marketers saying that it is NOT good to have 3 way linking. Can they justify then why they stress so much on reciprocal link exchange, which is also the smallest kind of ring. Well their own products or strategies will suffer if 3 way gets going. This is absolutely understandable, if I want to exist on internet I will have to kill my competition. While there are others who say it is a great innovation.
For the time being I will not agree with anyone who is pro to 3 way linking or is anti with it. I will elaborate it in the mean time.
It's a well known fact that every incoming link counts as a vote for your website. Now the strength of every vote depends highly on the strength of website linking back to yours. So there may be 3 incoming links to your site still search engines might be showing less than 3 backlinks, it is because other backlinks are filtered out as no vote for your website or their vote is not accounted for by the search engine. Search engines have their own logics and they strive hard to give web searchers with best possible results so that they retain them. They try to make it sure that internet spammers do not get away with most of the traffic while some genuine service providers are left behind.
I have tried all kinds of link building techniques on my websites. Let us take a brief look at linking procedures adopted by webmasters. Look at them all individually and make up your own decision whether you agree with me or not.
Linking Out - #1
A links to B : This kind of situation says that your website has 3 outgoing links and there are no incoming links. Your website has to be pretty highly ranked and have good PR strength so that all those 3 votes count for the websites that you linked to. Pretty tough situation and this kind of scenarios will not be possible practically.
Linking In - #2
B links back to A : Now we are talking about backlinks (one way incoming links) to your website. Say you have 3 websites linking back to yours and there are no outgoing links from your website. Your sites have got to be special. From search engine point of view if you update the content of your site on a regular basis and more pages are added on a weekly or monthly basis then it is a good resource where the web surfers will be benefited from. Now if there were 5 pages on your site 3 years ago and now also the situation is same then search engines will not be very much interested in it. What will happen is in due course of time is that someone else who is an active webmaster (adding and updating content) will rank you out in SERP (Search Engine Ranking Positions).
Link Exchange - #3
A links to B and B links back to A : This is also known as reciprocal linking and had been going on from a long time. This is the smallest possible ring where two websites link to each other and is detectable with ease. Are these kind of link exchange's not honored by search engines? Yes, they are and they always will be. You may or may not get proper value for that incoming link (depends highly on the theme and strength of your linking partner) but you are not in any kind of trouble as long as you stay below radar. If you have 100 links back to your website and all are reciprocal link exchanges then you are definitely asking for trouble.
Now back to 3 way linking
If #3 above can exist then why not 3 way linking. After all this can also happen organically.
Look at this scenario, this article is linking to my article published on Ezine Articles for
3 Way Linking And Its Benefits.
The article at Ezine Articles is pointing to the home page of 3 Way Linking
Will that flow of links not look natural, of course it will. Had this article been published on some other
website then it would have been a perfect 3 way linking scenario with quality information all around.
Link building has to be smart enough to provide a lot of variation. Although this will all evolves naturally over a period of time. We did not think of reciprocal linking 10 years back, similarly we did not think about 3 way linking 2/3 years back.
In summary I would like to conclude it like this. If you apply all four techniques in some controlled proportions along with updating and adding content to your website every search engine should look up to your website and put 5 stars by its side resulting in high SERP and traffic.