Well, we all are here for gaining traffic to our websites because the sites that can drive traffic make the most profit, especially the targeted traffic from Google and other search engines. Thus search engine marketers have been exploring different ways to win top rankings and more traffic…some good, some ‘black hat’…every time they find something new they don’t forget to shout ‘eureka’ and start selling their killing secrets to us like anything! I am not against this approach as being an online seller I would like to use as many marketing tactics as I can. But then its Google who doesn’t want their searcher to get deceived with some new non trusted result which sometimes is unfair for new businesses actually willing to work hard for their clients and instead want some trust in Google.

Of course nobody would like to wait for 4-5 years so that their site gets old enough, have gazillion inbound links blah blah…so they always try to crack search engine algorithms to break the queue of old players but on the next turn Google finds it and devaluate…same is the case with “link wheel” strategy invented and marketed by some SEO wannabe!

Basic link wheel system

Link wheel building is about having 5 or so pages (spokes) belonging to popular web 2.0 platforms like squidoo, WordPress, Hubpages etc and in some cases article directories, pointing to each other and then to your site (money page) in an attempt to improve its rankings in Google’s organic search. Essentially you try to gather link juice from pages with related content and then point it to site in center. You would then social bookmark all the spokes to further add to the benefit of process. You could also create sub-wheels i.e. the small wheel around one of the spokes in main wheel that simulates a natural internet setup like primary level spokes with handful of inbound links and then linked to from secondary level spokes those too had backlinks but not as many as the latter, and so on.

Actually the concept has been pretty common to interlink WebPages from different sites/blogs to have your own network of backlinks but when a fancy name was slapped on it, people dreamed of a overnight miracle and fell all over themselves to get it.

The special thing involved here was wheeling with web 2.0 properties and popular article directories those are considered to be highly authorized on any given topic for obvious reasons like more and more people interacting and adding fresh content to them. It is observed that squidoo or scribd pages can rank on page one for even competitive keywords due to their authority and solid internal linking structure that sends link juice and relevancy to new pages.

Google supposedly looked at link wheels like natural networks and boosted the targeted pages up in search results. But as usual the effect didn’t last long and link wheels were caught on by mid to late 2009.

What went wrong?

We all know that Google has sufficiently intelligent algorithm for tracking any process such as link farming that tries to manipulate the organic search results but we do not know how it works exactly. However, it won’t be wrong to consider that more and more people using the same technique will definitely attract attention and if Google finds it artificial, they will penalize or degrade its use. Many of us believe that this is what happened to link wheels.

Till the beginning of 2009 (when it was first cited as marketing secret) and even for some time later everything worked fine. Then Google’s ever changing algorithm got wise and started tracing the link wheels and disregard the links in it that resulted in de-indexing of spokes and in some cases the money pages also got wiped out from index.

Such a overnight breakdown with link wheel system obviously was shocking for marketers especially to those who were successfully selling the stuff to others on different webmaster forums and on dedicated websites!, such as link wheel creation services, ebooks etc.

Are link wheels dead?

Yes, from where I am standing! People have tried to evolve the system so as to leave fewer footprints. They tried using all unique articles instead of some spinned content, keeping the loop open, complicating the interlinking (I wonder what made them think that they can create something that will puzzle a computer program), not creating all the spokes at once etc. Also there have been slight variations of link wheel like ‘link pyramids’ and ‘blog wheels’ (I love these names:D) but eventually Google will know it all!

In the case of very low competition, link wheel may have some effect unless neither of the spokes is de-indexed, penalized or nofollowed.

Final nail in the coffin!

Until now most of the popular web 2.0 platforms and article sites are aware of the fact that they are being abused by few marketers those are intended just to manipulate search rankings and not at all to place quality content that will be of great interest to their users. Therefore at few places now you can not have outbound links unless you publish required number of articles. At some other places they will delete your account without any notice if links are found sneaky and embedded in crappy content.

Thus if you are thinking about link wheel building then most likely it will be viewed as spam by publishing platform itself before search engines.

Conclusion: Stop wasting time

If you are a small business owner then I would suggest you to stop wasting time on link wheels. Anyway it decreases the quality of internet. Still if you think that its worth the time and effort, ask yourself whether you would like to create some valuable content on your site or rather the same content on some other site!