Shortly after building six websites several years ago, I was able to get all of them on page one of the SERP's. And guess what? Back then it was easy, the main things were your meta tags and getting some links, it really was that simple. Getting reciprocal links was easy and they did not even have to be that relevant, the most important thing then was getting your keyword in the ancor text. Looking back now its hard to believe it was ever that easy.
It had to happen eventually, the seceret got out and everyone else knew to put their best keywords in their links, and bam, page one SERP's. The modern reciprocal link exchange was born. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain.
The need to stay ahead drove me to start purchasing text links. I'd have my best keyword in the ancor text on every page of a large site. I would do this with one or two sites and presto I would be right back in the top three. This was fantastic! Think about it, $100 every 30 days to get thousands of visitors every single day. Things were going great, I had tons of traffic and most of my competitors spending a fortune with Adwords for a small percentage of the traffic I was bringing in.
And again the masses found out and the rush was on, site owners would look at their competitors back links and then buy enough run of site links to outdo them. It doesn't take long to get the attention of the SE's when everyone is abusing something that powerful, and once the SE's put their sites on it. it's over. In an effort to stay on top, I started researching top ranked sites for fairly competitive keywords like clothes, gifts and shoes. Services sprung up to help get more links faster with less work, automated link software was released etc etc. Now I am really excited because all I have to do is get one way links to my site's from relevant content pages. Now I have to figure out some way to get other relevant sites to give me a link without reciprocating.
Then it hit me, create a triangle of sites linking to each other, A would link to B, B would link to C and C would link to A, of course this will solve all my problems. How difficult can it be?
Very Hard!
Talk about a nightmare!
First problem after sending hundreds of e-mails and finally lining up two other relevant sites they wanted to put my link on an overcrowded links page four levels deep. Next big issue was webmasters that wanted two of their websites in the triangle, both of which had the same IP#, this was like putting putting up a flashing neon sign that read "Link Scheme". And of course lets not forget all the shady webmasters who would agree to a quality three way trade, but then would link back from a worthless spam filled directory or link farm. What a bad idea this turned out to be, a month and not one quality link. Where did I go wrong? And how the heck did I end up on this path to nowhere?
I look back now and think about the time that I spent trying to decieve the search engines could have been spent producing some valuable and useful content that would have naturaly attracted one way links. It took me several years to figure out, but sometimes its easier to go with the flow and give the search engines what they want, like real and valuable content. It may seem like the slow hard way, but in the end you'll see it's the only way to succeed long term.
Next time I'll discuss search engine friendly ways of acquiring one ways links.
Mark Dietzel owns www.NaruralLinking.com which provides
1 Way Linking advice. You can also read Mark's articles at
MarkDietzel.com
