If you’ve been doing or learning SEO for a while, you have probably read a lot about link wheels. Many marketers recommend using link wheels to rank for their keywords, while others completely ignore them. You will find people who claim they have had great results with this technique. Here is my experience and what I think about link wheels.
What is a link wheel?
First, I’m gonna summarize quickly what linkwheels are, so that you know exactly what I’m talking about. A link wheel is when you use third party sites like article directories, web 2.0 properties (think Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger or WordPress.com) or document sharing sites to link back to your site, and you also link these third party sites to each other, following a pattern.
Basically, these third party sites pages are linked between each other and also link to one or several of your money pages.
They can be closed or not.
Here is what a link wheel can look like:
This is an example I took from one of my tests. Mine was more sophisticated but it is only an example, so on this picture the wheel is closed, which means all the sites link to each other, forming, well, a wheel. Then, each site links to the money page I want to promote, using my main keyword.
You can also have a link wheel using document sharing sites, like this one:
On this one, each document sharing site links to your money page plus 2 other document sharing sites.
An open link wheel would be when all sites do not link to each other, and we don’t close the circle.
My experience with Link wheels
I have tested this link building tactic on several sites: one in Spanish language, one exact match domain, one big site already well ranked and with authority, and this one. I have built simple closed linked wheels, open ones, and very sophisticated ones with lots of interconnected Web 2.0 properties. Well, I have never had any long-lasting results from doing this. By long-lasting I mean more than a few weeks or months. With some of them I had no results at all.
To me, link wheels are a waste of time and money, and this tactic can actually make you waste quite a lot of time, as these wheels are not especially quick to build (or cheap if you need to use a service).
Here are the main reasons why I really do not recommend link wheels as one of your SEO link building methods:
1/ In my experience, this tactic doesn’t give results. There are many tactics and strategies that can help you get good rankings for your keywords, and in my experience, link wheels are not one of them.
2/ They are very time consuming. Even if you use WP plugins like Pretty Link, you still need to register accounts on a bunch of sites, prepare well rewritten content, upload to the sites, include the links. You’d be better off taking the same time writing 10 or 20 BuildMyRank posts for your keyword.
3/ They are spammy, leave footprints, and are totally artificial; hence it is highly probable that they get found by Google. It is quite easy for search engines to spot link wheels, especially if they are closed (which means the first third party site links to the last one), because they leave a nice big footprint. Now, I have never been penalized with the link wheels I built, so I don’t think you would be penalized either, but what I’ve seen is that Google didn’t give any credit to them, which means they are ineffective for getting higher rankings.
4/ They belong to SEO tactics, not strategies, and hence are not long-term. Although they might push a keyword up on page 2 or 1 for a while, it will probably be short-term. Again, you’re far better off building only one-way links to your site, or to do tiered link building. You’ll see results over time and it’s much more likely that your rankings will be solid and last for a long time.
If link wheel building does not work, what should you do instead?
Well, first, you need to build one-way links to your site. Then, something that does work well for SEO in my experience is tiered link building. This means building “link ladders” instead of link wheels.
A link ladder (this is not an official term) is when third party sites link back to your money pages, and other sites link back to these third party sites. BUT third party sites do not link between each other. You can add as many third party sites as you want on top of one another, but 2 or 3 levels are often enough to get good results, if you do it right.
Here is how tiered link building looks like:
This is just an example, and you can really do what you want with this strategy. You can have 3 third party sites separately linking to your page; one of which has a link ladder with 2 sites stacked, and another with 3 sites stacked. You can have a link ladder with 3 third party sites stacked on top of each other. You can have a link ladder with only 1 third party site and 100 sites that link to it (use a service, don’t DIY 
). This is more like boosting a link than doing real tiered link building, though.
This link building strategy is much more effective than link wheels, and it can really help your rankings. I wouldn’t say it is more effective than traditional one-way link building, nor would I say that you should do it, it’s a matter of choice and you should know that it works better than link wheels. To me it’s a real SEO link building strategy, it’s not just a tactic or a fad, and it’s long-term if you do it right (varying anchor text, publishing several pages of good content on your third party sites, etc.).
If you can use your own domains with PR to link to your site, and then link back to these domains with third party sites, it will usually give you good link juice and it can really help your rankings. Doing tiered link building on pages you control is always better in my experience than doing it only on web 2.0 properties or similar sites you don’t control.
If you have more questions about link wheels, just post a comment below.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
WOW Anne! Great post, I learned a lot here. Thank you so much for taking the time to create this valuable post.
I have already asked a highly recommended marketer to build 2 link Pyramids to two sites over a 4 month period. The strategy he will use is similar to your tiered sample above but on a much bigger scale.
The two sites already have upwards of 500 good quality links with variable anchor text and a good internal link structure so it will be interesting to see the results.
Thank you again
I will PM you with the results,
Briano
Thanks Briano. I think that doing this over time (like the 4 months you mention) is a good approach, because it seems more “natural”. I’m interested in your results