Link building 101: What is a Link Wheel

So what is a link wheel exactly? I think it's pretty common SEO knowledge that links are good for sites. The more links you have, and the higher quality those links are, the higher you are going to rank in the search engines. Of course there are factors that affect your ranking that you control on your site, but let's save that for another article.

Anything that happens off your site is known as offsite SEO, and since links are coming from another site to your site, a link wheel is an offsite technique.

Okay, so how does a link wheel differ from any other link, and what's the "wheel" part of the name? Link wheels are one of the most advanced SEO link building techniques out there right now.

A link wheel is the process of creating 12 or so (or sometimes up to 116) new blogs/microsites on a particular topic. On each of those sites, you write 200 words of unique content, and include 1 link to your targeted site, and 1 link to one of your other blogs/microsites.

Now the trick here, and why link wheels are so effective is the new blogs and microsites we create are on sites like Hubpages.com, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, which are established, PR6, PR7, PR8 sites, and the subsequent blogs benefit from these attributes.

Also, by including a single link to each of our new sites, we are passing the value from one site to another, building up the value of each of our links. And since each of the links are only one-way, that is, site 1 links to site 5, but site 5 links to site 2, the link juice is passed to all of the sites, and not diminished by reciprocal linking (linking site 1 to 2, and 2 to 1).

So what we have is a network of up to 116 microblogs with 200 words of content related to our niche, with links all pointing back to our targeted site, making our targeted site look like an authority on whatever topic we're trying to rank for.

The link wheel picture to the right shows a number of popular Web 2.0 services. While in the past it has made sense to link from site 1 to 2, 2 to 3, and 10 to 1, this is a pattern that is very easy to pickup on by the search engines.

So now the tradition is to do random linking to make the links look more natural and harder to pickup as a pattern:

Site 1 to 5

Site 2 to 3

Site 3 to 8

etc.

There are hundreds of sites that allow you to write articles on them, with their classification all being web 2.0 sites. The important thing to remember is that all sites are not equal. You want a site that allows dofollow links so that the link juice passes from one site to another, here are a list of sites that as of the time of writing this article are dofollow:

Blogsome.com
Blogger.com
Squidoo.com
Wetpaint.com
Wordpress.org
EzineArticles.com
VOX.com
Quizilla.com
Weebly.com
LiveJournal.com
HubPages.com
Onsugar.com
Prlog.org
Devhub.com
Yolasite.com
Terapad.com
Beep.com
Webnode.com
Viviti.com

Be sure to always use unique, high quality content in your link wheels, otherwise you run the risk of having the articles deleted by moderators.

If you are considering hiring a team to do your link wheel construction for you, there are some best practices you should ask if they follow:

- Always use unique content, spinning articles produces horrible content that is unreadable
- Ensure they are auditing their Web 2.0 sites and they are all dofollow
- Ask if they have any revitalizing options for link wheels (ie updating content every 2-4 weeks)
- Ensure they are using a random linking pattern to make the link structure more natural

Speaking from personal experience, I have used outside firms to build link wheels simply because they are so time consuming. Writing this article has taken 30+ minutes of my time, and if I was planning to write the 116 link wheel packages myself, it would take me days. So whatever your business is, your time is better spent making yourself more money and leaving the SEO grunt work to the professionals.

This is a common and extremely poingnant question for site owners looking to promote their services. First of all, offsite SEO practices have a limited chance of seriously harming a site. Think about it this way, if offsite SEO can get a site banned, a new form of SEO would emerge -- competitor killing.

Now, instead of trying to move your site from #10 to #1, all you would have to do is build malicious links to your competitors in sites 1-9, and then by default your site would climb up.

Link any form of SEO, moderation is key. So building your SEO strategy using only link wheels is a surefire way for your site link profile to look suspicious. But if you link has multiple links from all sorts of sources, your site looks more and more natural.

Link wheels are an ever evolving SEO process, and keeping up with what is working and what isn't working is paramount for success in building quality links for your website. Did you know that the traditional linking from site 1 to site 2 is no longer a best practice for link wheels?

Here are some more great resource articles to checkout:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5785025_seo-wheel.html
http://seolinkwheelers.com/blog/
http://wisestartupblog.com/featured/how-to-increase-your-serps-with-seo-link-wheels/3809/