One Way Links: What Is The Big Deal?

Are you new to the online marketing game? Have you noticed all the talk about one way links and backlinks? Has anyone explained what they really are and why they are so vital?

If you are curious or confused, you will not be, by the end of this article. The bottom line is the more one way links you get, the better the search engines will treat you. You’ll get more organic search engine traffic.

A backlink (or, back-link in the UK) is any link to a site that comes from anywhere other than the site itself. If you have a website and there is a link that takes visitors from one page to another page in your website, that is not a backlink. Any link from any other website on the internet is a backlink.

The terms, one way link and backlink are synonyms. There are just different ways of saying the same thing. Technically, a backlink is a one way backlink.

If you have a friend who links to your website from her site, and you link from your website to your friend’s site, that would be a two way link. It does not help you. If you do not have a link to her site, then her link to your site would be the coveted one way link.

When Google was being developed as a project named, BackRub, by two Stanford University students, search engines could not have cared less about what sites were linking to or where sites were getting links from. BackRub changed all that. The assumption was, if a website is important it will get a lot of links.

BackRub’s program, or algorithm, made the number of links a site gets, one of the greatest determining factors the listing the site would receive in the results pages when searches are done. At first, a two way link was not treated much differently than a one way link. It continued to be that way for a few years after BackRub become Google in 1998.

As the word got out to the internet marketing community, they created link pages on their websites. You would link to any number of websites and they would link to you. This was an early form of SEO (search engine optimization), and it produced very good results.

Other search engines started copying Google in this regard, but when Google realized that webmasters were more concerned with exchanging links than providing quality content, they changed the algorithm that runs their search engine, to make those links worthless. This too, was followed by the other search engines.

The best way to get quality one way links from websites all around the internet is to provide fantastic content. Other websites will link to your website without you even knowing. That is a slow process. How do you get a head start on that? The best way is with article marketing. Publish articles on directories around the web and link to your website from your articles. The more articles you write, the better your results will be.

That turns it into a two way link, or a reciprocal link, and it will not help your search engine rankings. There are numerous different strategies to go about link-building. You are required to go for the do follow blogs because this will maximize your website page rank. One Way Links This article, One Way Links: What Is The Big Deal? has free reprint rights.