A while back and without much experience, and too much time to kill, after a little work I achieved top ranking for six of my websites for their main keyword phrases. You want know what the suprise is? It wasn't all that hard, after some very basic on page optimization I started getting link's. Once a week or so I would send out around a hundred link request and would get around 20 to 30 links within two days. That was it, it was so simple!
Then the cat was let out of the bag, everybody figured out the magic recipe for top rankings, reciprocal links + keyword ancor text. The reciprocal link exchange boom was on. Everyone was trying to get more links faster than their competition, so software was released to help meet the growing need of more links.
I needed another edge so I started buying links, mostly run of site links. So I would get my text link on every page of a site. After doing this with a couple of sites, I would be back in the top position in no time. It was really fun! 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.
It wasn't long before every webmaster knew about buying text links, soon it was like an arms race only with links. It is inevitable that when that many people find out about something so powerful there's going to be abuse, which attracts attention, especially that of the search engines and when that happens the party is usually over So I looked at top ranking site's for terms like shoes, clothes, gifts etc. Everyone was trying to get more links faster than their competition, so software was released to help meet the growing need of more links. Now I am really excited because all I have to do is get one way links to my site's from relevant content pages. All I have to do at this point is come up with an angle that will get relevant sites to link to me without getting a link in return.
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?
Extremely Difficult
What a joke.
First it took weeks to find two sites willing to participate, then they wanted to put the links on irrelevant and spammy links pages. 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". Then there was quite a few shady operators who were actively seeking triangle links who wanted a good link from you, but wanted to link back from a 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. Took a while for the light to come on, but real content is a sure way to get quality one way links. Plus if you have quality content it makes soliciting for one way links much easier. Though it may sound difficult at first, creating solid content and practicing ethical SEO strategies is the only proven recipe for long term success.
Next week we'll exam ways to get quality one way links to your site.
