A Mathematical Cross Linking Strategy

Over the coming days and weeks, I will be creating many pages on different domains all centered around a particular niche. I intend to link these pages together to help them all get back links but I want to avoid reciprocal links which Google does not like. I’ve come up with a strategy for linking any number of pages together in a way that generates the maximum number of links without creating any reciprocal ones. All I need is a little basic mathematics, and a spreadsheet! Luckily for you, I already did the math, created the spreadsheet and made it available for you to download :-)

The easiest way for me to explain this is with diagrams.

Linking 3 Pages Together

This is pretty basic setup. I start at the first page and move clockwise, linking to the next in the sequence. There is nothing else I can do here without inserting reciprocal links. Here is the maths:

3 pages, 3 links = 1 link per page

Linking 4 Pages Together

Again, I begin by moving in a clockwise direction linking each page to the next in the sequence. But having done that, I now move back to page 1 and skipping page 2 which I already linked to, I see that there is a potential link open to page 3. I do the same with page 2 and that gives me two extra links - the diagonals in the diagram.

4 pages, 6 links = 1.5 links each

Obviously there cannot be 1.5 links to a page but within this network of 4 pages there are 6 links, so by adding one extra page to the network I have managed to create more links overall. This pattern gets better the more pages we add to the network…

Linking 5 Pages Together

I start as before with a clockwise sequence of links, this will always result in a 1:1 ratio of pages to links, in this case 5. Then I move back to page 1, skip the next page and link to page 3. I do the same linking pages 2 to 4 just like I did with the 4-way network.

There is a precise pattern here, in the first round I create links, linking each page to the next in the sequence. In the second round I go back to the first page but this time I add links to the page which is 2 pages down in the sequence. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

5 pages, 10 links = 2 links each

If you look at the diagram you’ll see that each page does in fact have exactly two back links and there are no reciprocal links. By adding just 2 more pages to the network you have doubled the number of links to every page in it. I’ll do one more diagramatic example:

Linking 6 Pages Together

Ugh! This one looks messy but it’s actually very simple.

Round 1: (link to next in sequence) 1->2, 2->3, 3->4, 4->5, 5->6, 6->1,

Round 2: (skip a page) 1->3, 2->4, 3->5, 4->6, 5->1, 6->2

Round 3: (skip 2 pages) 1->4, 2->5, 3->6

Do you see the pattern? On each round you skip an extra page. This time we have 15 links shared amongst 6 pages creating 2.5 links each.

The Maths Behind the Madness!

These are triangular numbers and there is a definite sequence. Check this out:

Image courtesy of Computer Science for Fun. Notice the pattern? 1, 3, 6, 10, and it will continue… 15, 21, 28 etc. Each time we add a row of dots to the bottom of the triangle and the number gets much bigger each time. Notice that at each point in the sequence the number of pages we have in our network is one more than the number of rows in the triangle. So with 5 pages, there were 4 rows in the triangle and thats 10 links.

Is It Worth the Effort?

I have no idea, there is only one way (for me) to find out and that is to try it! It has been complicated to explain but now that I have done it, I have made the process a lot easier by putting all of that information in a spreadsheet which makes it very easy to implement so there really isn’t much effort at all - just a matter of typing in the URL’s and doing a lookup.

How Far Should You Take This?

That’s another question that I don’t really have the definitive answer to, so I can only say what I plan to do. You have to remember that this is not just about building back links - it’s about providing something useful for your visitor. What are the pages that you are linking to? Are they relevant to the current page? Will having those links there detract from whatever it is you want your visitor to do?

I’ll give you a scenario from one of the niches I am working on. I have got 24 individual chunks of content for one topic in that niche. That is enough to create 4-5 pages for each one of the 5 keyword phrases that I am targeting in that topic. I’ve seen some other people taking a single piece of content and simply rewording it and then publishing it to multiple platforms. That’s fine but if your visitor was to see all those duplicated pages they wouldn’t really get any extra value from them so it would be redundant to link them together.

With my strategy, every single page will have completely unique content on a different sub-topic within the niche therefore its valuable to my visitor. My ultimate aim for each page is to direct the visitor to an affiliate page but I can do that in a discreet way by showing a handful of related links, most of which are my other pages, and one of which is the affiliate link.

How Many Links do I Want on Each Page?

Not many, probably no more than 4 or 5. Doing the maths, here is what I have:

• 3 pages = 3 links = 1 link per page
• 4 pages = 6 links = 1.5 links per page
• 5 pages = 10links = 2 links per page
• 6 pages = 15 links = 2.5 links per page
• 7 pages = 21 links = 3 links per page
• 8 pages = 28 links = 3.5 links per page
• 9 pages = 36 links = 4 links per page
• 10 pages = 45 links = 4.5 links per page
• 11 pages = 55 links = 5 links per page

Look at the pattern there - each additional page adds 0.5 links to every page in the network. Gotta love maths!

These are the links INTO the page but the network is setup so that the number of links going OUT from a page is the same (or 0.5 higher). So looking at that, I wouldn’t want more than a dozen pages in my network, it would get pretty complicated then anyway. I’m going to be building my content pages for my niches over the coming weeks and I am working on three niches at once as part of an experiment so I doubt I will get around to doing all 24 pages of content that I mentioned above, especially as that particular niche looks as though it has the lowest income potential of the three I am experimenting with. However, if I did create that many, I would split the pages into two separate networks and link them as above.

I Made a Spreadsheet to make it Super Easy to Implement!

Trying to visualise all those links beyond a small handful of pages is rather tricky so I have put together a spreadsheet which shows very clearly how to build the links. I have tabs for any number of pages from 3-12. You can download the spreadsheet here. Feel free to distribute it but please leave the link to my blog in there if you do, thanks :-)

Using the spreadsheet is simple:

1. Select the tab that corresponds to the number of pages in your network
2. Type in the urls of each page in Column B
3. To build links, pick a page from column A, following the row, look for anything without a ‘x’
4. The number 6 -> 1 for example tells you to link from page 6 to page 1
5. A link in red is one that you should remove if you have just added a page

That’s it! I hope you find this strategy and the spreadsheet useful. Here’s that download link again.

Stumble it!