One Way Links

Are one way links better than reciprocating links?  Not necessarily.  If you have reciprocating links from well established business websites that result in you making sales, it is hard to beat that!

If you are talking purely about the value for search engine rank, then a one-way link has more weight than one that reciprocates.

The rank of the sites and pages from which they come

Each site has a rank for its keywords on its pages.  The highest rank is almost always going to be its main page or index page.  The index page is the page that loads when you type in the domain.  This index page, home page or welcome page will load by default, and in most cases, if someone tries to reach a page that is no longer on the website, it will redirect the browser to this page.

What is the page about that carries your link?  How is this determined?  Well, the search engines will read the Title of the page, which displays in the very top of the browser window (not on the page itself), and they will read the meta tags and look to the content of the body of the page to decide what the page is really about.

They will also take into consideration the inbound links to the page (what the content is of those pages and the text of the inbound links) when deciding the value of this page or the “rank” they will give this page in their own index.  The alexa.com rating of the page may count as well.

The higher the rank of the page that publishes your link, the greater the value of the link.

The number of other links on the pages from which they come

The fewer outbound links on a page, the greater the value of the links, and the greater the number of outbound links on a page the lesser the value of the link.

You should not have more than 100 links on a page is a good rule to follow, which is suggested by google.

The higher your link is on the page the better as well.  It would be better if there were 100 links on a page for your link to be #14 than #76, for example, and if the links are near the top of the page, rather than being placed near the bottom, that is a better link.

If the page is in a table, the links have more value if they are in the top-left of the page.  The closer they are to the first column an first row, the better.  This is true regardless of whether not the page was build with a conventional table or with CSS.

The content on the page from which they come

The more closely the page contents matches the contents of your own page, the greater the value of the link.  If the contents of the page from which you receive the link is totally unrelated, it still has merit, but it is not worth as much.

 For more detailed information, get my eBook titled "Off-Site SEO"