The Different Ways of Website Linking

Let’s face it.

Creating and building links is one of the most effective ways of improving your website’s search engine ranking. Without it, getting a good ranking will be a near-impossible climb. The science of search engine optimization gives a lot of importance to various kinds of links as a way of improving not just search engine results and rankings but also in how links can improve the overall feel and functionality of the website.

In order to help you optimize your website to the fullest, you should have a working knowledge of the various links used in a website. Below are some examples of the different website linking methods:

Reciprocal Link

A reciprocal link is a link made between two web entities – commonly this is a link between two websites with purpose of driving traffic to both their sites. To illustrate this, if Website A puts a link pointing to Website B and Website B puts up a link that goes to Website A then they have reciprocal links. There are website owners who decide to build reciprocal links easily by submitting their websites to directories that promote reciprocal link exchanges. They do this in order to get higher search engine rankings. Reciprocal links are popular because search engines like Google use link popularity algorithms as a way of ranking websites based on their relevance to the keywords.

There are three other ways of getting reciprocal links: Three way linking, automated linking, and link exchange.

In three way linking, links “naturally progress through each site and in the way search engines see it. Three way linking is also called webrings by other practitioners. Automated linking uses automatic link exchange services as a way of “automatically” generating links to a website. Link exchange, on the other hand, is another option if you don’t want to use automated linking. Link exchange forums offer a community in which members will ask for links that they want and in exchange will offer a reciprocal link or even a three way link. Usually these links are subjected to an editorial review in order to ensure that the links are related to the common keywords.

One-way linking

Unlike a reciprocal link, a one-way link is a link from Website A that points to Website B but Website B does not provide a link back to Website A. This type of link, also called an incoming or inbound link, is seen as a more “natural” link when seen by search engine crawlers.

One method of building one-way links is by submitting articles to various content sites and article directories. Use the small boilerplate for the Author to place a link back to your website.

Multi-way link

One method of promoting a website is through multi-way linking. In this method, websites makes one-way links that point to 3 or more partner sites, creating a situation in which each website is provided with a one-way non-reciprocal link.

In fact, this practice rose from reciprocal linking practices. Multi-way linking is an answer to the latest search algorithms being used by search engines. These new algorithms do not give much weight to websites that have a high number of reciprocated links. Instead, it tends to favor websites that have a high number of incoming no-reciprocal links.

The term multi-way actually refers to the link exchange that happens between 3 or more websites. But each link is singular in that it only points to one website. Some website owners use other methods to indirectly point to other websites – this includes images, video, RSS feeds or content from third party websites.

Incestuous linking

This type of linking is a clever way of promoting a website owner’s own set of websites or the sites of friends and family. Because of the algorithms and rules for search engine rankings based on PageRank technology, the common belief now is that inbound links coming from sites that have a high ranking will boost the rankings of your website. In a way, incestuous linking will allow the high rank of one site to boost the rankings of the other sites of the same owner by linking them together.

Link Bait

A link bait is a powerful piece of website marketing because it is viral and, thus, can propagate itself without you exerting any additional efforts. A link bait is a feature or piece of website content that “baits” website visitors in placing links to it in other websites. Link baiting is another way of link building as it seeks to increase the number of quality and relevant links to a website. One way of to make link baiting successful is to mount a campaign to promote the release of a link bait article to help in making bloggers and readers give attention to it and help promote the article. Of course, quality content is a required prerequisite for link baiting strategies. You may have a campaign to promote your article but if the content is bland and non-interesting, the target audience still won’t pay attention to it.

There are also some linking situations that you should be aware of so that you won’t commit these mistakes. Among them are:

Overlinking

There is also such a term as overlinking. In this situation, a webpage has too many hyperlinked texts. Overlinking can manifest itself in many ways: a big chunk of words in every sentence is turned into links; links do not have amply information content (like linking on unnecessary common words that have a very common meaning, and; a link for a term is repeated in an article too many times (this usually happens with links for a certain word repeating in just one line or paragraph).

Underlinking

From the word alone, this is the opposite of overlinking. Underlinking happens when hyperlinks are used to such a limited degree that even the use of links to elaborate on a term or to put context to one is also removed. The most extreme form of underlinking is the dead-end page, a situation that happens when there are practically no links on the page.