The Legend of Three Way Link Schemes

Developments in Internet Marketing and SEO are ultimately driven by theories. Few of us really know full well just what goes on behind the white wall of Google. We can research, test things out, and so on and develop theories based on our results. This doesn’t always work out in reality and many myths are born this way. Just like the myth that three way link schemes just create one way links, rather than reciprocal links.

The idea behind three way link schemes (and larger ones) is that it simplifies the SEO on webpages, giving the full benefit of reciprocal links without a hodge-podge of links going this way, that, and the other. It’s an elegance of design, and saves the page developer a bundle of headaches if links accidentally get broken or during routine maintenance.

Also, a large part of SEO is about simplicity of page design and having as little code as possible in a website. It’s a proven fact that the search engines approve of having as little code as you can get away with on webpages. Three way link schemes minimize code by having all pages link reciprocally in a circle, rather than a lattice form.

Basically, the way three way link schemes work is a circle of one way links creating reciprocation. Imagine that you have three pages labeled a, b, and c. Connect page a to page b, page b to page c, and page c to page a to form a triad of one way links. Because page a is indirectly connected to page c through page b, and page b is indirectly linked to page a through page c, they reciprocate the direct, one way links.

If you don’t use three way link schemes, you wind up with a bunch of junk code. This can delay page loading time in some cases, which diminishes the SEO quality. With the above example, you have only three links to code on your entire three page site. If you reciprocally link each page to each other, you have six links to code on your three page site. This gets exponentially more complex for each page beyond three that you add. The amount of code for links goes through the roof at five pages, and gets astronomical at just six.

The myth would say that these one way links in the three way link scheme remain one way links, and that the indirect reciprocation doesn’t count. That’s not how the spiders see it. Back to our circular model, if a Google spider leaves page a and gets to page c and gets back to page a, it will see it as reciprocal linking. Of course, the same is true going from page b to page a by way of page c.

In the end, aside from ranking purposes, three way linking schemes also save on labor expenses for page generation and maintenance. It saves the developer time in sorting through code that doesn’t need to be there to begin with.