Link wheel - Is it really that effective?

hey guyz,

We are all aware of what forum posting Sb sites, do-follow blog commenting, pinging, directory submissions etc do. Don't we?

Last few months have been busy and I have been searching a lot about mini-net sites and link wheel of web 2.0 sites. I have searched a lot people offering this service on many forums about how they will interlink their sites to these sites and to your money sites to gain SERP in google, as the big G' takes this as a natural linking.

What do you think?

Can one article in each of these sites be more effective?

Or selecting 5 best sites and updating it with 2 articles a week, interlinking it and Social bookmarking them each week and doing all sorts of pining be more effective?

What do you think about this new theory that has developed in recent times?

 

Link Wheels are useful for dominating NON competitive keywords, but when you are in a competitive keyword(s) it is pretty useless since most of them have over 150k backlinks.Anyways I would go for 5 best sites and updating etc.

 

The bigger the link wheel you create the better. As rightly said by rootbinbash, first check your competitor's backlinks profile then start building your satellite sites.

 

this method was very effective in the past but nowadays you have get the link wheel linked with two or three sub wheels to expect results. moreover for any kind of link building process you have to concentrate on low supply high demand keywords to reach top ten at search engines.

 

Also, I think link wheel is only effective with long tail keywords. Don't you think so?

 

Most effective keywords help more than any thing else.

 

What's a sub-wheel? A smaller linkwheel that's linked into the larger (main) one? And is the smaller wheel still pointing to the destination site at the middle?

 

Yeah I think he was saying you can make a link-wheel made up of smaller "self contained" link wheels.

 

Link wheels are largely a sham quite frankly. It is just another fly by night shortcut that largely only works in the short term and generally peddled by bottom tier SEO folks.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

Honestly Nigel? I wouldn't even call them bottom tier, or even SEOs for that matter.

Con artists, frauds, snake oil peddlers, that's what I'd call them.

 

To me link wheel is just a waste of time, if you link wheel doesn't have a quality back links, it is not gonna work although you target the low search.

Take sometimes to build a quality link from quality real domain is what I would do.

 

Nigel,

I've noticed that on just about EVERY linkwheel topic you post the same thing, bashing linkwheels as a sham and a weak shortcut used by people too lazy to do long-term SEO.

Then, right after you finish destroying them, you have a link to your own SEO company.

While I don't fault you for trying to promote your own agenda, repeating the same thing over and over again every time someone brings up linkwheels isn't constructive. So maybe tell us why such a concept doesn't work, and even give us some alternatives?

A linkwheel made from quality articles on quality sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, etc... should actually work great, unless you have a concrete reason why it shouldn't.

 

Rightly said Vozzek,

Nigel and Dan Schulz have declared almost all link building methods we discuss on this forum as waste. And the methods they talk about getting backlinks are tough and i think only big web entrepreneurs can achieve that.

For small time webmaster like us, article submission, link exchange, blog commenting, and links from all web 2.0 sites works. Yes it does.

 

It's tough? How is asking people to link to you tough? Sheesh, and to think I call myself a hermit.

 

Well i personally sent email to 5 of my competitors for link exchange. NO f***ing reply. The idea seems bogus to me. Why would they want to link to my Site with PR 0, while they have PR 3+

 

There's your problem. You tried getting links from sites that COMPETE against you, not COMPLIMENT YOURS.

 

Actually link wheels are useful but they have been hyped up too much.

 

I have provided alternatives that are not designed to simply game the SERPS.

For the sake of discourse(not attacking people) It is Google's job to return the most relevant results for (X) query. Being relevant is not accomplished by simply pointing a bunch of links at a site. It is accomplished by actually becoming relevant.

As I have indicated before, Dan has already posted a very comprehensive list that should, in theory I suppose, get people on the right path. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=12104573#post12104573

My posts are not intended to piss people off. If they do, well, that is not about me. My posts do hopefully cause folks to stop and think for themselves and arrive a better way of doing things.

For reference, I am in fact writing a very comprehensive article on the subject that should be up soon. I am currently in the middle of retooling my entire website so I am tad swamped in the meantime. When I bother to write something, it is to be informational and helpful in nature, not get a backlink. See my knol on color management as an example.

I have also repeated ad nauseam that, while sig links may provide some minuscule benefit to someones task at hand, it is NOT SEO. Hence, your comment about my sig area is a non sequitar. Forum anything is not professional SEO, its marketing.(Does that help to explain why I have to repeat myself?)

I do this for a living. I do not get paid, however, to offer advice here or anywhere else. I do it because I enjoy helping people. It seems to me that it would be wildly counter productive to spoon feed people the finer points of what I do.

But since you asked nicely, I will proffer a bit of advice for you folks, on becoming relevant and generating much more effective links.

A huge misconception around here is that writing an article, well crafted or otherwise, is best served by submitting it from here to east jesus. Or, on a range of arbitrary web 2.0 properties. I am not really of the opinion wordpress is a web 2.0 property incidentally. They were around before o'reilly coined the term. Just being picky on that point though.

In reality, what you want to do is write something useful, not regurgitated plop someone else already wrote 10 years ago. This then goes on your website, not all over the internet, varied anchor text or not.

So, once you have done this, the real trick is to get folks to reference the material. This step again is much easier if you bothered to write something useful. So I am clear, you are not looking for your competitors, you are looking for sites relevant to yours so the links are inherently related and or complimentary to yours and said information.

"But how do I do this Nigel"

This step requires a keyboard, an internet connection and at least one finger. I have however seen this done by taping a pencil like apparatus to your forehead. What you do is seek out blog owners etc. that write on the same subject matter a product, what have you... and send them a nice email.

As this seems to be the part that folks think is some sort of mind blowing proprietary methodology, I will provide a quick template for you to use as a starting point.

Here we go, stay with me, its not complicated.......

Hi [insert bloggers real name here] my name is [insert your real name here].

I was reading over your post the other day about [insert topic here] and found it really insightful. I was wondering what you thought about blah, blah[some more relevant info goes here. Don't actually say blah blah]

The point behind the main content area of the email is the engage the individual a bit without blowing his horn etc. But I digress....back to the email.

I was thinking about something similar a few days ago in a post I wrote here[insert link to your post here] Since we seem to be on the same page I was wondering if you would want to engage in a discussion about it on our respective sites and see if we can't get a bit of discussion going on.

Thanks alot for your time [insert blogger's name], [insert your name]

************** end email*************

So, lets take a look at this.

You have effectively done some sound networking, potentially gotten one if not several highly relevant, contextual links, made a great connection and taken a postive step towards becoming relevant.

Time to completion, about 10 minutes. I can assure you that this sort of link it much more valuable than heck, 20+ links from your linkwheel. Which, incidentally takes considerably more time to conjure up.

10x as efficient-----------> exponentially more powerful = happy clients.

So to recap a few things...

1. Stop trying to game the serps. You are wasting your time and or your clients money.

2. Sending an email is not rocket science.

3. You want links from relevant sites that compliment your content. Not from your competitors site. (big resounding WTF on that on actually).

4. Be nice a make a contribution

5. Forum signatures and posting is not SEO. It is marketing.

6. Link wheels are no different than triangulated poop from back in the day. If your link building campaign is based around this, you will be completely screwed much sooner than you think.

7. It is ok to ask a colleague for a link, grease a few palms etc. Just be nice about it and provide something relevant and useful.


hope that helps, I may have to edit a snip or two for spelling or something. This one took a sec
Nigel

 

Linkwheels are a waste of time just build a site with great content, do your keyword research and work on getting relevant backlinks. Seriously if you create good content then people will link back to you.

 

very true. But now he has given some explanation.

That's really foolish of you. Why will a guy exchange links with someone at only PR0. At least get close to him by other ways and than try this method out.

Even I have a PR3 website and get such request. I don't even half read them.

.

That's very true.

How can you say that?