Should you get Involved in Triangular Linking?

What is Triangular Linking?

Triangular linking occurs when a site offers to link to your site if you will link to another website they recommend, i.e, site (A) agrees to link to your site (B) if you will link to the other site (C). Site A and C are often owned by the same person/company or else they have become partners with others involved in this linking scheme. It is a link building strategy that is easily detected by the search engines. It is also known as a Pyramid Linking Strategy.

It's Purpose:

They do this to gain one way links to their site and to overcome Google's recent policy of discounting over use of link trades. However, triangular linking is easy for Google to spot because many who is listed on site A will also be linking to site C , i.e., both sites have similar incoming and outgoing links.

How can Google detect triangular linking?

Google is mapping the Internet and trying to eliminate spam and duplication so they are very adept at recognizing attempts to "game" their engine. When everyone listed on one site links to another site it would be very easy for Google to see a pattern.

Google's Penalty for this Linking Scheme

Google is trying to eliminate people maniuplating search results so everyone involved in this triangular linking scheme is likely to have all incoming links discounted for linking to a bad neighborhood.

Other reasons to avoid it:

The site requesting that you get involved in this scheme might be using "no follow" tags on their outgoing links pointing at your site so they don't leak PR (Page Rank). So you may not get any benefit for getting involved, even if it wasn't penalized.

Variations of this Scheme

There is also another linking scheme called circular linking (call it hexagonal, or any other geometric variation) where one person (often the web designer) links to the next person and that person is told to link to the next person, like in a chain letter, so they aren't actually exchanging links. However they are usually controlled by one person and they usually all required to link back to his site.

Most webmasters are wise to these schemes and refuse to get involved because Google can detect dishonest linking schemes and ban their website.

For more information see Google's Webmaster Guidelines