Are Link Wheels Really Worth Your Time and Effort?

Are Link Wheels Really Worth Your Time and Effort?

No doubt about it, link wheels are controversial. Depending on who you ask, they may even be considered a “blackhat” SEO technique – in other words, one that may be effective at least in the short-term, but that’s heavily frowned upon by Google if and when they notice it.

But what exactly is a link wheel? Do they have to be as “blackhat” as some SEO experts make them out to be? And even if they can be made in an acceptable fashion in the eyes of Google’s search-bots, are they worth the (considerable) time and effort they take to create?

Link Wheels and Web 2.0

In short, a link wheel can be defined as a closed loop of circularly linked Web 2.0 sites, driving traffic to each subsequent site in the chain and, more importantly, to your home site. In the context of discussions regarding link wheels, you’ll commonly hear the home site referred to as a “money site.” This is because the ultimate purpose of the link wheel is to drive traffic to your site, making you more money.

So what are Web 2.0 sites? Prime examples include Squidoo, Blogger, Weebly, HubPages and WordPress. These sites (and their underlying pages, seemingly regardless of quality) are ranked very highly on Google. Anyone can publish content to these sites, embedding links wherever they like within each page.

By now, you probably see where this is going. The whole strategy behind a link wheel is to post identical or very similar content targeting your niche to each Web 2.0 site. Your page on Blogger contains one-way links to your page on Squidoo, which contains one-way links to your page on HubPages, and so on. Meanwhile, each piece of content on each Web 2.0 site also contains backlinks to your money site.

Why Google Frowns on Link Wheels

Although Google seems to love Web 2.0 sites and the content they contain (yes, even the miserable content), they certainly don’t like the ideas of link wheels. Why? Because according to Google’s linking guidelines, link wheels are considered a link scheme, and therefore a blackhat technique that will only result in the severe downranking of your money site. The trick, then, is to create a link wheel that actually enhances your site’s “natural link profile,” a term Google uses to define a site where linking has been developed naturally and in a diverse manner instead of being forced.

Reinventing the “Wheel”

In order to prevent Google from detecting the fact that you’re using a link wheel, one approach is to change the structure of the wheel so that it better resembles a web. That is, get rid of the “wheel” appearance and have your Web 2.0 posts link to one another in a non-circular fashion. Doing this requires no more effort than a link wheel. You can further enhance the natural quality of your linking network by adding additional Web 2.0 sites to your overall link profile.

Approaches to Web 2.0 Content – Bad, Better, Best

The worst approach to developing Web 2.0 content for a link wheel is also the easiest – crafting a single page of content and posting that same exact to content to each site in the wheel, minus changes to link destinations. Google is capable of spotting this almost immediately, downranking you in the process.

A better (albeit still quite bad) approach is to craft one page of content and then spin it each time you post it to an additional Web 2.0 site. Article spinning is the process of running a page of copy through an algorithm that changes certain words and sentence structures while (hopefully) retaining the meaning of the original article. Although article spinners do help in preventing Google from sniffing out duplicate copy, they often result in chopped-up, error-ridden content that requires heavy editing before it’s ready for publication. This requires additional time and effort that could’ve been spent crafting original sites and content.

The best approach, of course, is the one that requires the most time and effort – writing totally original, unique, but related articles for each Web 2.0 site to which you’ll post. This is the only way of guaranteeing that both Google and your audience won’t smell something fishy, but it also necessitates a full-time writer with some serious skills in content creation.

Link Baiting – An Alternative to the Link Wheel

If link wheels still sound a little too “blackhat” for your tastes, there are far more Google-friendly ways of accomplishing the same goals (traffic and money) without resorting to anything that could possibly be deemed “shady.” A good example is link baiting, which basically boils down to publishing excellent, detailed, targeted content on your own site in order to score inbound links naturally. So long as you’re marketing your site correctly, people will find it, enjoy your content and link to it from their sites.

Let’s say you’re considering a link wheel centered around broadband provider comparisons, and you decide to target the keywords CLEAR compared to Verizon. The alternative approach is to create link bait content targeting similar keyword phrases, sich as “Clear,” “Verizon” and “Clear vs. Verizon,” all things that your target audience will search for.