Avoid Angular Links, Also Known as "One-Way" Linking Offers

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Be Careful of Angular Links, Also Known as "One-Way" Linking Offers

by Walt Thiessen
December 3, 2004
Modified: December 25, 2004

I had an interesting email this morning, and I thought my answer was worthy of publishing here on the website. He was asking whether we offer so-called "one-way" linking. This is actually a misnomer. It should be more accurately called angular linking

Why Be Careful with Angular Linking?

I have been approached by a number of webmasters who have offered me angular-linking relationships for websites I manage. After checking them out more carefully, I've decided that if there is anyone out there doing this method of linking ethically, they are are definitely in the tiniest minority. To the best of my memory, I approved only ONE out of the hundreds that have approached me...and only after checking their sites out extremely thoroughly. Even then I approved it with trepidation.

The overwhelming majority are hiding some defect or deception in their approach that harms the people they're linking with. The most common is link placement that is unreachable by spiders. That's definitely harming the victim who agrees to the exchange, wouldn't you say?

Others offer angular-link sites with wildly disparate PR levels. Why should I help their PR6 page with my PR6 page, when they give me a PR0 or PR1 page in return? That's always a bad trade, and it makes me wonder about the personal ethical standards of the webmasters are who are making these offers to me.

There are others that run sophisticated link farms that may or may not be detected by search algorithms. In my opinion, anything like that is something to avoid, because it will be discovered and rooted out by the search engines in the long run.

If it were done ethically and without intent to deceive or defraud, it seems theoretically that it could be an effective strategy. However, in practice, I wouldn't want to spend the time trying to find enough ethical webmasters willing to do it on a regular basis, considering so many who are actively practicing it are actually thieves of one kind or another. My two links teams are not interested in doing that kind of work...certainly not at the prices we offer.

It's interesting to note that I have never, ever been approached by someone offering an angular-linking relationship where the page I was offered a link on was higher PR than the page I was linking to. That's food for thought, in my opinion!