Building One Way Links

What is a one-way link?

A one-way link is a link from an external site to your site, with no return link from your site.  Why do search engines place more weight on one-way links than they do on two-way links?  In part to combat link trading, or link swapping, which involves exchanging links simply for the purpose of increasing your search engine ranking.  A one-way link is usually legitimate, but if a site links back to you, there's no guarantee you weren't involved in making that link happen.

Why one-way links?

The way to address the one-way link issue is not to refuse to link to the other site (which might just piss them off), but rather to have one "links" page on your site where you place all your outbound links (outbound means links leading away from your site - ie. not to one of your own pages.  Links to your own pages from the outside are referred to as inbound links). 

Don't link to junk

Make sure you don't link to junk from your outbound links page - search engines will evaluate the validity and relatedness of your outbound links (ie. don't link to the Fuji apple page if your site is about SEO tips), and don't link to sites that search engines may frown upon (ie. a site whose sole purpose is link trading - you can identify these by the proliferation of random links all over their site). 

Website link vs. page link

The best scenario is to have an inbound link to your page with no outbound link to the page that is linking you.  If you must provide a link, you may want to consider linking to a different page on their site.  Either way, if the quality and content is relevant and interrelated on both pages, the circular, or two-way link, will still prove beneficial.  In fact, it's a good idea to have some quality outbound links to relevant content.

Building one-way links

Successfully building one-way links goes both ways.  While most SEO aficionados will focus on inbound links, it's equally as important that your site be a quality resource for other websites.  That is, you also want to establish a series of outbound one-way links to related information sources.  You don't need to focus exclusively on building outbound links, it will happen naturally as you write content and reference or recommend websites with similar content.

Effective inbound link building

Check out our article on effective link building for more tips on how to effectively generate inbound links to your website.  Notice that we've built a circular link between our two pages (ah, the irony