Natural Linking Strategies and Complex Structures

As we all know link building plays a critical role when it comes to website promotion and optimization. Artificial off-page optimization through reciprocal link exchanges has lost most of its value because most of them are made to spam the search engine results, that's why most of the sites which promoted this linking pattern (link farms) and reciprocal networks have disappeared from the result pages.

Natural linking refers to one-way linking where site A places a vote to site B because of its content and relevance, through this structure site B is not required to place a link back to site A which makes it look more natural to the search engines thus increasing the rank of site B. Creating unique content is often the best way to gain this type of incoming links, however there is a still a similar linking structure which resembles reciprocal exchanges but is not heavily penalized by Google because it looks natural, of course we are talking about A-B-C exchanges.

This particular exchange takes place when site A points to site B and then B doesn't reciprocate the link but instead points to site C. Using this hybrid method each site gets a one way link except A but this can be fixed by setting up a three-way linking pattern with other sites. For most people this is as far as off-page optimization goes but the truth is that the ABC model can be escalated to complex structures which can be represented through geometrical figures for instance the ABC model can be expressed as a triangle, an A-B-C-D structure can be though of as a square, A-B-C-D-E would be a pentagon and so on. In order for these models to work several domains which are relevant to each other must be involved, theoretically this structure can achieve the aspect of an E8 polytope geometrical figure which wouldn't resemble the geometrical pattern of reciprocals that is easily detected through a script using the Floyd-Warshall algorithm.

While these are great structures they must be executed with precaution because even though they all seem natural they can still be detected by Google if you escalate the model within your own sites within the same source IP. Some people devaluate the power of ABC and greater linking schemes by placing the references on pages designed exclusively to be link-dumps which provide little to no use to the visitor. A better approach would be to distribute these references within your pages where the exchange doesn't look like a to artificially manipulate the search results.

At this point some people may think: 'If I place reciprocal and ABC exchanges within my main site pages I will have no space left to show banners and relevant information' this is exactly why you shouldn't entirely focus on one pattern, having a variety of one way and reciprocal arrangements without giving more weight to one structure over the other is what will keep you safe from the search engines raising a red flag on your domains, figuratively speaking of course.

Executing these link structures involves a lot of work but the benefits your domains will get from this work can far exceed those received from reciprocating references.