The first question many people have about one way links is why are they so important? If you compared two websites that had exactly the same content but one of them had one hundred one way links versus none on the other site you would see that the site with one way links had a much better ranking with each search engine. The primary reason for this is there is no reason for one site to link to another without a reciprocating link other than that site determines that the website is an authority on it’s given niche.

A one way link is when a website links to another site without asking for a reciprocal link back. Search engines regard these links highly because they demonstrate that the site that is linked to must be an authority site.

Essentially this means that if a site links to you and you don’t link back to them you may very well be an “authority website” Of course the more of these links the better in the eyes of the search engines. You can easily see why. If you are a website owner with a good page rank you most likely receive dozens of reciprocal link requests daily.

There aren’t any real shortcuts to one way linking but there are a few ways that don’t require a PHD. The first that comes to mind is website content. If you are writing for a small niche you may have fairly unique content that other like sites may find interesting and link to. You could wait for a very long time before you are “discovered” as a subject matter expert. The next way is to utilize article marketing and distribute your articles to article directories which when copied on their sites create a “back-link” to your site thus creating a kind of one way link.

Over the past several years search engines such as Google and Yahoo have placed a great deal of importance on one way links. Included in this category are “back-links,” which are created when your articles are published by another site. The back-link is in the author’s information box where you have placed a link back to your website.

Search engines reflect what they observe. If there are a lot of links to website A from other websites in A’s industry than A must be a subject authority. This is simple logic.

There have always been a number of very clever marketers that can figure ways of beating the system through bending the rules. My rule of thumb. If it doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t right.

Learn more about one way linking and other SEO tactics.