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. And guess what? It wasn't all that hard, after some very basic on page optimization I started getting link's. Mostly reciprocal links and all I had to do to get in the top three of my category was put my main keyword phrase in the link text. That's all it took, it was so easy!



It had to happen eventually, the secret got out and everyone else knew to put their best keywords in their links, and bam, page one SERP's. 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.

The need to stay ahead drove me to start purchasing text links. I'd have my best keyword in the anchor text on every page of a large site. After doing this with a couple of sites, I would be back in the top position in no time. This was fantastic! I could put almost any site I wanted in a top position on Google for a paltry investment of $50 - $100 a month. 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. I started looking at top ranked websites for the keywords of gifts, clothing and footwear and so on. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain. At this point I'm starting to get real excited because I have figured it out again, all I need is relevant content pages linking to me. 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 hard could it be?

Extremely Difficult

Talk about a nightmare!

After sending out hundreds of request and eventually getting two webmasters to agree the first issue I encountered was that they insisted on putting the links on spammy links pages that were almost impossible for a SE spider to find. 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. Man what a headache just trying to get one link for one site no way I could do this for all my site's. I thought I should just quit now, I'm beating a dead horse.

Now besides the headaches involved in trying to trick the search engines with schemes and black hat seo, there is a very real risk of having your site banned. 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. It may seem like the slow hard way, but in the end you'll see it's the only way to succeed long term.

The next article will deal with ways of getting one way links that are search engine friendly.