There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

What are one-way links?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn't link back to your website then it's a one-way link from your site to their site.

What are reciprocal links?

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you. That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.

What are three-way links?

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don't help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That's why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other. It's important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won't count much. However, that's also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.

It doesn't matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won't. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get links from web pages that have something to do with your site.

Source: Axandra News Letter

Google's Matt Cutts had a Q&A on the SearchMarketingExpo in Seattle. Here's a summary of the most important statements:

Google's supplemental index

Pages in Google's supplemental results are parsed differently than pages in the regular index. Pages from the supplemental results can get into the main index. According to Matt Cutts, phrase relationships are handled a bit differently for supplemental pages. He didn't reveal details. Webmasters shouldn't be worried if they have pages in the supplemental index. Matt Cutts has hundreds of his own pages in the supplemental index.

Paid links

Google considers buying links to be outside of their guidelines and they might take strong actions against that in the future. Matt Cutts indicated that "Google might take action" if webmasters buy links anyway.

Outbound links

Matt Cutts said that links to other websites are good for users, and therefore good for search engines.

The impact of spammy domains that are owned by the same person

Matt Cutts indicated that a webmaster who owns many spammy websites might get trouble with his other websites. Catalog pages and online store search result pages. Category pages in online shops work better according to Matt Cutts. However, a product should only be listed in the best-applicable category instead of being listed in 30 different locations. Matt Cutts recommended to analyze the web pages that currently have high rankings because webmasters can learn from them

Source: Axandra News Letter

Many webmasters overlook an important part of search engine optimization: if you over-optimize your web pages, chances are that your website rankings might drop because your site has been designed for search engines and not for web surfers.

How can Google find out that a web site is over-optimized?

Google has an algorithm that detects over-optimized websites. The detected websites are downranked in the Google search results. This over-optimization filter in Googles ranking algorithm is also called the "-950 penality" because that is what usually happens to over-optimized web pages: they are downrankied 950 positions. Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts published a video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4814548594071648913#1m42s) in which he also mentions over-optimization as a reason for ranking problems.

Is your website over-optimized?

Some "SEO experts" recommend that you should have H1 tags on your web sites in any case. Others say that you must have this element and that element on your web pages. If you follow the advice of all of these experts then it's likely that your web pages are over-optimized. Don't listen to everything you hear in SEO forums.

How to avoid over-optimization

It depends on your keywords, on your competition and on many other factors if you should use special elements on your website or not. For example, it might make sense not to use the H1 tag on your web pages if other factors are more important for your keyword.

Over-optimizing your web pages can harm your rankings on Google and other major search engines.

Source: Axandra News Letter