Link Strategy - Is link wheels dumb and waste of time

Link Wheels

Link wheels were one of the most powerful ways to get high rankings in the search engines. But over resent years they have totally lost their power and are no longer used by savvy internet marketers.

What Are Link wheels?

Below is a diagram of a simple link wheel

So basically you would create lots of high page ranking 2.0 properties (Blogs) on free platforms like Blogger and WordPress and then link them together with you main website as the hub as show in the diagram.  This would then increase the power of your site because Google see’s all of these high page ranking sites linking to your main site.  Google would then raise your site in the rankings because it thinks your site as an authority site.

What happened?

This linking technique worked very well from around  2008 – 2009, you could even buy software like SEnuke and EVO2 that would automate the whole process for you.   But Google got smart and started to deindex or totally over look any site that was part of a link wheel.

When did the link wheel start to die?

In late 2009 many online marketers started to notice that their link wheels were not getting indexed by Google as quick as they used to and to add salt into the wound some 2.0 sites like WordPress started to delete one page blogs that had more then two outbound links on them.   Google also started to deindex articles that looked like they had been spun or that did not have enough unique content on them.
So these sites that were part of any link wheel started to drop in rank or totally disappear overnight.

Link wheels today

Since late 2009 to early 2010 there have been a few link wheel hybrids that marketers are using and they have had some success.  But most of these newer type of link wheels are just too complicated and hard to create and other are just dumb and a waste of time.

The link pyramid has been for most internet marketers the link wheel hybrid of choice because it is simpler to create and easy keep track of.  Also there is a low chance that Google will not delete or de-index this type of linking structure because they are all one way links and they do not link together like a traditional wheel and it look’s more natural and not so man made.

Link wheel flaw

There is one big flaw with link wheels and it is this, if one of the links in your wheel are broke i.e get’s de-indexed or deleted as spam then all of the other links that are connected to it fall apart.

Final word

Let’s just sum this all up and let me tell you what you should do.  Forget about using link wheel hybrids like pyramids, clusters, pushers and other link wheel name that someone creates, they are a waste of time.  If you do chooes to use a link wheel then use the pyramid and outsource it on fiverr or odesk.  If you decide to create them yourself don’t bother as it is so time cosuming you could waste weeks and your site may still never rank that well.

From my experience just create a website with solid content on it and people will naturally link to it because it is useful.  With every new Google up date all of these little loop holes are getting closed but good useful content always seems to hold its own in the search engines.