Christian Little

A lot of people these days are convinces that reciprocal linking is a waste of time and that one-way links are the only way to roll. This is a false statement and you really need to consider the implications of it before you give up on the concept.

There are several service providers out there that will try to sell you on the concept that 1-way linking is all that really matters. Truth be told, those days are gone. And even when they did exist, it wasn’t for ranking purposes – it was for PageRank. And let’s be frank here – PageRank died a long time ago.

Google, and the other search engines of course, actually prefer it when you link to relevant websites. It shows that you are willing to reference them, and there are several chunks of code in Googlebot that look at who you link to, not just who is linking to you.

I’m not saying that 1-way links are a waste of time, in fact they can be very useful if you work at them. But they aren’t that easy to come by. Reciprocal links however, are way easier to build, and as long as you do it with relevant websites it’s worth the effort.

99% of the link building companies out there that sell 1-way link building services are crap.

They make claims that your link will appear on relevant pages (a lot of them will confuse Web Page with Web Site though). And they will build links for you…hundreds of them on junky link pages from poorly developed sites that will give a link to anybody and their dog.

If you really insist on launching a 1-way link building campaign, do it yourself. Don’t hire somebody that lives thousands of miles away, barely speaks your language, and really hasn’t got a clue about what makes a link valuable. You will only suffer in the end, and they will walk away with your money – and chances are you paid through paypal and they won’t take your side as the service was clearly delivered – so you are fucked.

When trying to build backlinks to your site, you should try to get a good mix of:

• 1-way links (which will come in time as your site gets more popular and offers good content),
• Reciprocal links (easy to do, and it still works if you exchange with RELATED websites),
• Article links (it takes 10-15 mins to write and article, and another 10 to submit it – the result is potentially hundreds of 1-way links (not necessary high quality, for the time/cost of it you should consider this)
• Directory submissions (spend 30-60 mins every week submitting to directories, it will pay off in the long run)
• Natural links (which will come when you provide a high quality site)
• Miscellaneous (i.e. forums, blog commenting, etc).

In case you’ve missed the point here: 1-way link building is not the best practice. It can work if you do it right, but hiring somebody to do it for you is the first step in the wrong direction.