Axandra news archive: 10 July 2007

This week, we're taking a look at one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links. Which links work best if you want to improve your search engine rankings?

In the news: people often repeat web searches, Google adds impression share metrics, 10 markets where Google wants to win and more.

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Recommended resources
• Previous articles

There are a lot of rumors about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?

What are one-way links?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if you link to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and that page doesn't link back to your website then it's a one-way link from your site to their site.

What are reciprocal links?

A link is a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You send visitors to the other site and the other website sends visitors back to you.

That makes sense because all visitors leave a website sooner or later. You can send your visitors back to search engines or you can send them to affiliates websites that send you traffic in return.

What are three-way links?

Some webmasters believe that reciprocal links don't help web pages to get higher search engine rankings. That's why they invented three way links: Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. None of the link types above is worth more than the other.

It's important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a reciprocal link is on a low quality page with links to every Tom, Dick and Harry then it won't count much. However, that's also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.

It doesn't matter if a link is one-way, reciprocal or three-way. It does matter if a link is on a related website. Links from high quality websites will help your rankings, links from garbage sites won't.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get links from web pages that have something to do with your site. ARELIS helps you to find these sites.

"People often repeat Web searches, both to find new information on topics they have previously explored and to re-find information they have seen in the past ... Our study demonstrates that as many as 40% of all queries are re-finding queries."

"For example, say you own a small lawn furniture business and you're using AdWords to sell your products. [...] To compare how often your ads are showing to the total opportunities they have to show, run a campaign- or account-level performance report that includes the new Impression Share columns."

"It looks to me like the 'show all your Google supplemental results' query is broken. As a reminder, this kind of query is supposed to show only results from Google’s supplemental index."

Search engine newslets

• Sneaky SEO tactics: bait and cloak.
• Google removes its old remove URL tool.
• Google: Our data retention is not data protection watchdogs' business.
• Google's bid for Double Click to be reviewed by EU.
• Google hits all-time closing high.
• A word of caution about Google Calendar.
• A map of Google products.
• New seven wonders of the world in Google Earth.
• At Ann Arbor Google office, the good life.
• Yahoo responds to reports of site outages.

"Google isn't perfect: in some areas, they come out behind. Today, Mashable takes an in-depth look at 10 markets where Google wants to win."

"When a client has high organic position and PPC search is layered on top, nearly every test we've conducted has resulted in a positive incremental ROI, particularly when messaging is different."

"Yahoo and Microsoft are preparing to announce concessions in their privacy policies in the next few weeks, as pressure mounts in Europe over the length of time internet search companies should be allowed to hold personal data."

"IBP saves many hours per task."

"When I first bought this program for my last employer, it was the best on paper.

Subsequently I confirmed that it was well worth the price, as it earned my employer many thousands of dollars.

I also use it in my own SEO training business to illustrate many concepts to the students and, of course, to speed up research on my own sites.

IBP, after all, does everything you could do manually, but it saves many hours per task. That is the real saving, even if you don’t sell these reports for a living."
Review by Ash Nallawalla

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