Link Wheels – Are they Whitehat or is it a Dark Art?

by Geno Thampi - 3/30/2012 6664 Views

Do you want Matt Cutts to say “It Depends”?

Link wheels confusion Today, when someone hears “Link Wheels”, they say “Google hates link wheels”. However, what I would say is “Link Wheels is a broad term and the compliance of this strategy with the search engine guidelines depends on how you do it”. For example, publishing entirely unique, fresh and well researched content in popular social media blogging sites and then connecting the information together is termed as a “Link Wheel” by humans. However, if you are implementing this strategy, it is not a “link wheel” to a search engine bots eye. For them, you are supplying relevant, unique and fresh collection of information to the surfers. Now if you think, this link wheel strategy sneaks past Google’s eye you are wrong! According to us “Link Wheel” is just a fancy term used to describe a completely whitehat, organic content marketing strategy.

Look into the strategy, not the term!
So next time, when an SEO expert says, you need to implement a link wheel service for promoting your website, don’t just avoid them saying “link wheels are black magic I don’t need my website penalized”. Instead, ask them more details about their link wheel strategy (The strategy differs depending on the person planning it and there is no definite rule). Now, here is a checklist to find if a link wheel strategy is safe.

Say “NO” to the link wheel if the strategy has any of the below:

Usage of copied or same content being published everywhere.
The strategy concentrates more on forming a network of links rather than giving importance to the keyword research, readability of the content used or the quality of the sites where links are obtained from
If someone says, the more complicated the link wheel pattern is, we will be able to escape from Google bots eyes.
Use the same anchor text to frame the entire link wheel
The sites from where the links are obtained are not customized with complete profile information. Just the signup would be done and the links would be obtained.
The entire link wheel or a part of the link wheel is from a network of sites on the same IP or same group
Any automated process is used to build, update or generate links

Here is how a Google safe link wheel would look like?

The links would be obtained from well written, full length blog posts. The posts would be written after extensive research and on topics which would highly interest the reader.
Each website used (social media blogs would be used mostly), would be from a different blogging service provider and would carry unique blogs. Same content will not be used everywhere
When setting up the accounts in the blogging sites, the profiles would be completed as much as possible with authentic information. Social media connections would be made wherever possible as well.
The link wheel pattern would be very simple. The concept of a successful link pattern would be to generate a natural flow to the adjacent site. For example, if someone lands on a random post, the links would direct them to a fresh content which would relevant to what they were already reading. This opens up opportunity for the reader to explore many more social media sites available out there.
A very strong keyword research would be done to write the content. The keyword research would combine several factors such as competition, trends, number of searches and so on. Separate sets of keywords would be used with each site as well.
All the profiles would be built manually making sure there are not mistakes and the content would be published manually with outgoing links in spots that makes perfect sense.

To sum up, a good whitehat linkwheel would be built with the user in mind not the search engine bots. If you strongly agree with the fact that content is king for search engine optimization, you would also agree with the fact that the above mentioned link wheel strategy would work great as well.

Alright, there are a few people who will never get convinced till someone like Matt Cutts assures that a SEO strategy is safe. For them, I got one interesting comment actually posted in seowizz “Link wheels aren’t a dark art, no Matt Cutts won’t advocate them but if you wait for him or anyone at Google to give the thumbs up you’ll stay well behind your competitors.”

But if you still need him talk, I got this very interesting video of Matt himself recommending linkwheels (Just kidding, as already said, he won’t say it, so someone created a fake video of him recommending it).

Matt Cutts On Link Wheels

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

content marketing, link wheel, safe link wheel, Google

About Geno Thampi

Not a born Shakespeare! But I still write articles and blogs to share my ideas and thoughts on SEO and SMO. Being a part of SEO research team of SubmitINme, I keep my ears and eyes open, and the pen ready to grab, write and share trending topics in search engine .... more info