A brief link wheel guide for SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is without any doubts a great method to get your site ranked high in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). However, with more and more updates being rolled out by Search Engine giants and many internet marketers trying to abuse the techniques (using black-hat SEO techniques) to rank their or their clients’ sites high, the SEO world has become quite tricky to make sure that users get the results that are most relevant to their queries. But it doesn’t mean that SEO is going to end, it has evolved and if you know how to work your way out it’s still the same.

So What Really A Link Wheel?

The link wheel is one of the off-page techniques under the umbrella of SEO, yes SEO is that broad. Link wheel helps you to create backlinks to your ‘target’ website in order to get higher rankings. The idea behind this strategy is to create a circular pattern of links that easily go through a number of websites and get back to the ‘target’ website. This is the ultimate goal of link wheels, to end the circle at the target website or in-case of a business website take the visitors to any product’s information page to purchase it or inquire about it. This circular pattern is similar to a wheel and that’s how this technique got its name.

The Evolution Of The Link Wheel

As with every other thing, evolution also paid visit to this technique. Now, a link wheel looks a bit more complex but still resembles to a wheel. The target website is more like a hub of the wheel whereas the outer websites that point to it form the wheel, except this time each of the outer websites link to each other and link back to the main website – this would look like a wheel with spokes. This method helps to create more backlinks to the target website and provides better exposure as compared to the basic wheel. The basic pattern of link wheel is as follows:

Site A links to Site B and then link backs to the “Targeted Website”
Site B links to Site C and then link backs to the “Targeted Website”
Site C links to Site D and then link backs to the “Targeted Website”
…
Site Y links to Site Z and then link backs to the “Targeted Website”
Site Z links to Site A and then link backs to the “Targeted Website”

Search Engines Didn’t Like It

Search Engines are not aggressively against the link wheels, tiered links, or link pyramids, but many web masters (as usual) exploited an algorithm pattern to create backlinks to their websites which at one time worked amazingly well.  While the old technique and exploit, it is no longer valid.  Creating backlinks to your own site counts as a ‘vote’ to yourself and it is what we call the ‘conflict on interest’ – search engines are not very fond of it. Moreover, this patterns is quite obvious and easier for crawlers to know what the website owner is trying to do here. Therefore, to tackle this problem a more randomized and way to create backlinks to ‘target’ website has been adopted. This random patterns helps link wheels look natural and go through scrutiny of search engines’ web crawlers easily.

Basic and Advanced Link Wheel Techniques

The Basic Link Wheel Structure

Basic link wheel structure is based on a concept of a singular wheel created from multiple web 2.0 properties. The image below explains it quite well. You can see how each web 2.0 property links to another web 2.0 property forming a complete wheel. Moreover, each web 2.0 site then link backs to the ‘targeted website’. However, this style of link wheel has faded with the introduction of the advanced link wheel which is a bit more complex.

The Advanced Link Wheel Structure

The advanced link wheel structure takes into consideration the randomization in order to make itself pretty much untraceable. Unlike the basic link wheel, the advanced one has multiple properties like Web 2.0 sites, Blog posts and Article submissions. So, an advanced link wheel structure consists of:

Web 2.0 Sites, Blog posts, Article Submissions, Wiki Sites, Guestbooks and even Social Media.
Multiple smaller ‘sets’ or ‘link wheels’ that comprise of the properties mentioned in point 1.
A randomized break within every small link wheel or set where a site or post doesn’t link to the next one.
You can see all these clearly in the image below.

The SEO Benefits Of The Link Wheel

Creating high quality backlinks for your website is a great way to improve your rankings in SERP and is great technique of Off-Page SEO. Most of the Web 2.0 sites and other quality blogs are a great way to create these links and that too in greater numbers not just a couple of links. It surely is a great way for businesses and other site owners to get high traffic on their site. The more the traffic, higher the chances of maximizing revenues. Therefore, Link wheel SEO is a great technique if applied carefully and can be very helpful.

Social Signals Are Starting To Be More And More Important

We cannot undermine the importance of social networks and the social signals they generate. By liking, sharing, +1’ing or tweeting any of the posts on article directories, web 2.0 sites and different blogs you get votes towards the ‘targeted site’ and more traffic since people see how a certain post or site is being circulated around different social networks. Therefore, social signals like tweets, retweets, Facebook likes and so on can play their role to land the traffic on your site.

Only Quality Link Wheels Work!

Link wheels themselves don’t abuse any loopholes or go against the policies of search engines, it’s the way we use them. So, make sure you create quality link wheels to make them work. Here are a few tips:

Create your own high quality unique content to distribute on web 2.0 sites, blogs and article directories.
Create complex link wheels to make sure you don’t leave any footprints for web crawlers.
It is very important that your site has also high quality content otherwise it will turn away the traffic.
Don’t get into link wheel if you have a completely fresh site. Wait for some time, add content, let the domain age a bit and then get into the game.  All of these activities can be quite time-consuming but they are completely worth it in the end.

Link wheels are a great way to create a lot of quality backlinks to your site and improve your rankings in the SERP but it has to be done with a proper strategy in order to get the maximum benefit of this technique otherwise it works the other way around.

Linkwheel.pro offers next generation link wheel, link building, and custom SEO services at affordable prices and high return on investment.

Last updated: 12/5/2015  Bookmark this page and check page for updates in the future.