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 was actually kind of easy, I just did some basic optimization and started getting links, which was a lot easier back then. 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's all it took, it was so easy!

It had to happen eventually, the seceret got out and everyone else knew to put their best keywords in their links, and bam, page one SERP's. The modern reciprocal link exchange was born. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain.

I had to get ahead of the pack again, so in addition to link exchanges I started buying text links. I'd have my best keyword in the ancor 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 felt like I had the keys to the search engines, for less than a hundred dollars a month I could put a site in the top SERP's. 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.

Once again everyone eventually discovered the power of buying text links, the race was on once again. When a lot of people get their hands on something that powerful abuse is inevitable, which attracts the attention of the SE's, then its usually downhill from there.

So I looked at top ranking site's for terms like shoes, clothes, gifts etc. It was not obvious at first, but I started noticing that most all of the top sites had one way inbound links from quality sites. O.K. now I'm pumped, I've just got to get one way links from relevant content pages and I'm back in the saddle again. 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.

Them it came to me, I'll create a circle, no - a triangle, yes thats it, a triangle of sites giving and recieving one way links, A=B, B=C, C=D yes this will address the issue of one way links.

How difficult can 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. Second issue was webmasters with two sites on the same server and same IP# that wanted both sites in the triangle, this was going to look like a reciprocal link to the SE's. And then there are the webmasters who have their main domain and a second domain that they have set up just for the purpose of triangle linking, usually the second domain is a "junk domain" meaning they have given it just enough links to show some page rank so that you think your getting a quality exchange. What a nightmare this was turning into, almost a month and not one decent link. I thought I should just quit now, I'm beating a dead horse.

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.

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