One Way Linking
As we have seen earlier, Link Building is an important part of Search Engine Optimization, and is a way of getting other websites to link to your site.
Major search engines try to determine the importance of each link and its relevance to your site. In order to get more links and higher ranking, webmasters in the past tried to use dishonest ways to manipulate and trick their way through the search engine algorithms. They would have mass linking to websites, trading links with ‘link farms’ and guest books etc.
As search engine spiders got smarter, due importance began to be given to "non-reciprocal" links. For a spider, non-reciprocal links meant no tricks and only genuine linking.
Non-Reciprocal Linkings refers to the process of creating one-way links.
In a high quality link building campaign, the amount of non-reciprocal one-way inbound links should be in a healthy mix along with quality reciprocal links exchanged on the site.
Link building in general is an important part of making sure your site ranks well in the search engines. Google and many of the other search engines include link popularity as part of the way they evaluate the web pages they include in the search. Links are seen as a positive "vote" towards the quality of the web page. Each individual page acquires link popularity based on the pages that link to it. Google and Yahoo both have toolbars showing the page rank of pages you visit, so you can use these tools to get a good estimate of your pages link popularity. Acquiring links pointing back to your web site, particularly links from sites covering the same or related topics as your site, is helpful in the overall scheme of search engine ranking.
The biggest advantage of one-way links is that you don't have to worry about linking back to a "bad neighborhood". If your site has links pointing back to sites that serve as "link farms" or "free-for-all" sites, you may not gain, and could actually lose page rank. These sites are rarely focused, and tend to have links to and from all different sorts of sites. Since there is no particular topical emphasis here, it is clear to Google and the other search engines that the only motive for these sites is to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your site. There is no value added for the search engine's users and they in turn give no value to these links.
One-way links also help as they tend to stay in place. A web site that features a link to your site probably does so because that site's owner thinks that their visitors will benefit from the content your site has to offer. Rather than simply trying to manipulate search results, they want to add to the experience of their visitors; you benefit from having a long term link in place. Whereas, sites featuring reciprocal links may simply drop your link when it no longer suits their linking strategy.
