Every webmaster knows about the concepts of getting a decent Alexa rating or Google PageRank. One of the factors used for the PageRank is incoming links. So every webmaster started getting links to his/her website. This was mostly done by “LinkExchanging”. When doing a Link Exchange, two webmasters trade a link to each others website. Thus causing a kind of “win-win” situation.
So far so good? Yes, and no… Off course google changed their algorithm a bit, so that the weight of those exchanges decreased a bit. Action causes reaction, and webmasters found an alternative for this. This being 3 way linking. A technique also known as ABC linking, yet it’s a little more complicated way to setup link trades.
The benefits of doing this kind of trading is that it is harder for search engine robots to detect the link exchange. Instead a link from site A to site B, where site B does not link to site A, has more effect, even if site B has a link to site C. It is not that obvious that the owners of site A and B is trying to enhance the number of incoming links.
Addendum
If you’re looking for a good tool to automate your link-exchanges, try “linkex”, a real timesaver!