Four years ago with very little experience and a lot of time on my hands I was able to put four baby sites and two gift sites on page one of the SERP's for their main keywords. And guess what? Back then it was easy, the main things were your meta tags and getting some links, it really was that simple. Getting reciprocal links was easy and they did not even have to be that relevant, the most important thing then was getting your keyword in the anchor text. I couldn't believe it was that simple!

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 modern reciprocal link exchange was born. Services sprung up to help get more links faster with less work, automated link software was released etc etc.

I had to get ahead of the pack again, so in addition to link exchanges I started buying text links. I would have the same exact link on 500 or more pages. After doing this with a couple of sites, I would be back in the top position in no time. This was fantastic! Think about it, $100 every 30 days to get thousands of visitors every single day. Life was great, I had all the traffic I could want, while some of my competition was spending all their profits with Adwords trying to get more visitors.

Once again everyone eventually discovered the power of buying text links, the race was on once again. 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. So I looked at top ranking site's for terms like shoes, clothes, gifts etc. Link exchange services and software popped 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. 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 hard could it be?

Very Hard!

I must have been out of my mind!

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 problem site owners who insisted that two of their site's be in the triangle but both sites have same IP, what's the point it's just going to look reciprocal to the engines. And of course lets not forget all the shady webmasters who would agree to a quality three way trade, but then would link back from a worthless spam filled directory or link farm.

What a nightmare this was turning into, almost a month and not one decent link. Just shoot me now and put me out of misery.

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.

Next week we'll exam ways to get quality one way links to your site.