Backlinks are critical for your website’s success. How many ways do you use to get them? You did know there are many different types of backlinks. Actually 8 very common types are discussed here. Plus this article will discuss which types of backlinks are most helpful.

Two Way Links are still valuable. That means reciprocal links are still useful but not as strong as some others. These are 2-way links whereby webmasters agree to link to each other. Because they are so easy to get, they are less effective than other types of backlinks but they’re not “dead” like so many people claim.

Social bookmarking links are also of little value. Getting social bookmarking links is a good way to get a new post or page indexed. However you cannot rely upon just social bookmarking links if you want to rank well for highly competitive terms. If you look in your website’s Cpanel under the AWSTATS interface you’ll see that social bookmarking links are in a special category separate from other types of links because they are devalued links.

While you are looking for great one-way links do not forget that you need to have a reasonable number of internal links and outgoing links at your site. Otherwise it seems to be an unnatural flow of traffic and that reduces the value of your links. There is no doubt that one way links have power now and perhaps they always did.

Blog commenting for backlinks seems to be a very popular method because it is a free method for getting backlinks from relevant sites. However, these types of links aren’t very valuable either, especially on blog with the NoFollow attribute set on those sites. There is still some value to blog commenting for backlinks but if you analyze your return on investment on the time it takes to get these links versus the value of those efforts you’ll see that this is a time-sucking effort that usually isn’t worth your time.

When you get three way links or 3 way links it is usually a part of a networking system. Three way links are a hybrid of reciprocal links and 1way links . The way it works is you link out to one site and a different site links back to you, so it is non-reciprocal. All of the sites are part of the same network. When the network is full of quality sites, then there is real value to this automated link building. There is the risk of losing all of your links if you cancel your membership for most of these services. Also, this types of linking service is most helpful for low-competition keywords or key phrases or niche topics. If you have a portfolio of mini-sites with low competition terms, this is a good deal, you can add about 50 sites to these networks and get backlinks to all your sites automatically with 3 way links services.

Footer links are links at the bottom of sites that link to other sites. Many SEO bloggers claim that these types of links are ineffective and they are 100% wrong! Nowadays, footer links are most often seen at the bottom of blogs with links to the site that made the free WordPress theme, if the webmaster was using a free WordPress theme and many of those WordPress theme sites attain high Page Rank in very little time. And the same holds true for the sites where WordPress plugins are downloaded, and there is one marketer who has his footer links in all of the Master Resell Rights Websites he sells and all of those sites and sales pages that people are putting up are linking to his main site, which is page 2 for the term “make money online”. Suffice to say that footer links do work well if there are a lot of people using the themes, plugins and leaving links intact into the footer sections of the Master Resell Rights website packages.

Paid links are a waste of your money. You’re better off paying less of a monthly fee for a linkbuilding service like Unique Article Wizard that delivers quality and permanent one way links in quantity. Paid links are those that you pay a fee for in order to get a high Page Rank and relevant links back to your site for your chosen keywords. Those links are not permanent and will only last as long as you keep paying for them.