The problem is that three-way linking has become an increasingly popular ploy among search engine cheaters. Why have many webmasters trying to play fast and loose with search-engine rules turned to three-way linking? Most people engaging in 3 way link exchanges are doing it with the express intent to manipulate search results. The real problem is that if their two sites are not connected and they are primarily working to benefit the link popularity of their main site then it does not really hurt them if the site linking to you gets banned. If those sites get banned then they parse no link popularity to you. check Google's Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Triangle linking will get you a penalty eventually. Why bother getting your site penalised when there are legitimate ways to build genuine one way backlinks (look a little lower...)
Always link to some edu or org high pr sites when you are also linking back to your own site. One more thing is to make sure that those sites interlink together dont have the same ip
As a newbie, i would like to ask these questions: 1) What is 3-way linking? 2) What is 4-way linking? 3) What is a Triangle Linking?
Exchanging links with other sites is always risky. For the unacquianted, 3-way linking (as the term suggests) pertains to link exchange involving three domains. For instance, site A links to site B, but not B to A. Instead, site B is only getting a one-way link from site A and not linking back to it. The link will be placed in site C.
works fine until google penalizes you. All it takes is one competitor to dob you in it and bye bye.... if that's FUD, then yeah. Right.
I have never heard of a site getting banned because of a 3-way linking reason. It all depends on the quality of the site you get linked to. If you have links on a low-quality spammy site, then even if you have used the best technique for link-building, you will get banned.
Actually, any kind of link building done for the sake of raising your search engine ranking is bad in the eyes of Google. And for the record...I wish people would stop throwing the word banned around so freely, there are very distinct differences between getting a ranking penalty and being banned. I feel it takes a lot to be banned from the index (removed completely), but doing something black hat can get you penalized (knocked down in ranking). For the sake of argument: If we look at a definition of Black Hat SEO it says "Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception." So, going by this definition, any type of link building strategy could tread on the line of being Black Hat. Link building is like voting for yourself in a popularity contest, it's a biased process. Google wants you to have links, but they want you to get them naturally, not by filling out your own ballots.
1) What is 3-way linking? - Three way linking is a backlinking method that hopes to avoid Google's reciprocal linking penalty. It you have two websites that want to share links and they directly link to each other, Google may cancel out some or all of the page ranking power. (Two way linking. A->B and B->A so the it clearly looks like reciprocal.) By linking three sites you try to avoid any direct reciprocal back links. (Three way linking A->B and B->C and C->A so all three sites are getting a link, but no site links back to the site that linked to it.) The concept relies on Google's PageRank algorithm not being able to decipher that it is a link sharing plan. I personally don't know if Google does or does not identify these automatically. 2) What is 4-way linking? - Four way linking is an extension of the three way linking plan but you add another site. (Four way linking A->B and B->C and C->D and D->A.) It works just like three way so that no site links back to the site that linked to it, but has one more layer. You could have a loop of any size really. 3) What is a Triangle Linking? - Another term for three way linking, it describes the shape the links if you mapped them.
FUD is "Fear, Uncertainty, and Despair" -- it's something that restricts the ability to think rationally in most humans. Three-Way linking would be me linking to FoxNews from one of my sites and FoxNews linking to another of my sites. Well shucks, that's already happening. I must be a black hat SEO exploiting the most dangerous weaknesses in Google's algorithms. I own a few hundred web sites. The only way for me to effectively prevent three way linking would be for me to remove all outbound links on all of my web sites. After all, I can't prevent people to whom I have linked to not link to any of my other sites. Let's say that I link to you from Fort Liberty. The next year, you might see something you like on Gun Shots and link to it. Wham! We're three-way linking. OMG! We're going to Google hell! Run in circles! Scream and shout! Nah... people spouting out about three way linking are merely spreading FUD because it's easier to repeat what other people say than it is to think rigorously.
Thank you for putting it out there. Every single forum has it, the people that read bad information somewhere from an "expert" and then they come in and spit out these "facts". Inevitably, SEO is a game, a trial and error process. You don't succeed if you don't take chances, if you don't experiment a little. If you are to take everything that the Great Google writes as law, then you'll never get ahead. Google may set the rules, but we all know that every rule has a loophole, or it can be bent. In the eyes of Google, any SEO work is "Black Hat", because we are manipulating the search results. I use the term black hat loosely here, as I'm well aware that it's reserved for spam, and cheating, blah..blah. But, I will say, I've had better results in my SEO efforts, when I challenge the system, instead of being a sheep and listening to what all these self proclaimed experts spout off about.