Linkwheels – effective or outdated?
What is the story on linkwheels? Are link wheels still an effective and easy means of increasing SERP position and SEO? Should link wheels be one of your SEO tactics for 2011?
I’ll give you my take.
Link wheels and variations have been around for almost 8 years. At first they provided an easy to use roadmap for quickly improving website ranking.
Just create a main site.. link 5-10 more in a circle and back to that site.. and voila!
A=>B, B=>C, C=>D…. L=>A
Linkwheels became main-stream SEO practice about 3 years ago in response to Google devaluing reciprocal links. It was a relatively easy transition for companies running large reciprocal link schemes to transition from reciprocal links to link wheels. The relationships between linking websites were already in place and it was as simple as defining the wheel and updating the links such that all links were one-way and non-reciprocal.
Usually anything that is easy just isn’t worth doing. And in this case it couldn’t be more true. As most black-hat tactics link wheels are totally unsustainable and they will not provide long-term sustainable advantage in search.
Black-hatters have increased the complexity of these wheels in an effort to sustain their advantage but the return on effort continues to decrease. Link schemes such as Pyramids, triple hubbed link wheels (not really wheels anymore), etc. are still tricky for Google to identify but when they do the penalties are severe.
Although sophisticated schemes still deliver short-term gain the probability and impact of getting caught are not worth it. Unless you are extremely sophisticated in your scheme and you are a start-up with nothing to lose I strongly suggest you avoid implementing any linking schemes in 2011.
The traditional and basic link wheels are easily recognised by Google and they are getting better at identifying more complex link wheels. Google is at war with spammers and their SWAT team is becoming increasingly ruthless. I would go as far as to say that if you have any schemes currently in place I would proactively work to break these wheels.
Focus on your content. Create good content and great promotional campaigns. Only invest in natural link building.
That’s it. Simple really.
Natural traffic is one way. It does not all point to the same page, from the same host or to the same keyword.
Natural traffic comes from all random points on the internet and links in varying ways and depths of a site.
You need to make sure that your link building does the same.
Is this more difficult? Heck yes it is.
Is it easily automated. Heck no.
That’s what makes the difference.
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Jamorama i think you have a great site here… today was my first time coming here.. i just happened to find it doing a google search. anyway, great post.. i’ll be bookmarking this page for sure.