Im trying to find a really good link builder for my website. Alot of the link builders I've come across say they will us link wheels as a link building method. Is this a black hat or white hat technique? will google penalize my site if I hire someone to create link wheels for me?
No, links wheels are only peddled by hacks. See the following thread. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1503118 actually I have several but you catch my posts or Dan's it should be a bit more clear. I have said this ad nauseum but.... It is google's job to return the most relevant result for (x) query. Hence, in order to rank well you have to make the site actually relevant. This is not accomplished by throwing a bunch of arbitrary links at a site. hope that helps a bit. Nigel
I wouldnt concentrate on it as a strategy for optimising competitive serps, but if your only throwing up some sites then a link is a link... dont pay too much anyway... same level of price you might be better off with some goe relevant directories... or smbs or something like that
I think link wheel helps a bit but just don't spend too much money/time on it. Better spend your time on creating quality contents for your site.
They are good as long you build each site with unique and valuable content, and instead of just making the wheel, you should link to good sites like wikipedia and related niche sites too. Also, the link structure should not be linked right away but slowly, link each site slowly. A link per 3 weeks. Each of the wheel elements must be promoted in order to gain some authority. Moreover, you should add fresh content for each of the wheel elements, so when all elements start having some traffic, and have a positive pagerank, you can finish your wheel. The wheel must be finished in 4 o 5 months. Of course this is the white hat method. This method will not penalize your site, and you will have some traffic from your wheel elements too. But, If you want to do it using the bad way, build the link wheel in 20 minutes using spun content, ping all search engines to notify your sites are live, link all the structure together and wait for your wheel to be indexed, as soon the googlebot reaches the second site of the wheel it will take them down, and good bye wheel.
I would completely avoid link wheels. Any method where you're creating multiple hubs just to up your own "link juice" and relevance, is fishy. Shouldn't your product, services, or content speak for itself? In other words, if your content is useful enough, others will create the links and hubs for you. A lot of people might disagree with me, and that's fine, but we build links using traditional methods. Sure it might be more time consuming, and we don't get 1000 backlinks per day or week, or month, but getting a few quality backlinks is important as well. Even more important is protecting the respectibility of your website and brand. If you are concerned about it being a legitimate practice, it likely isn't right for your website. Better safe than sorry right?
Its not what google has in mind, so therefore even if it does work for a short period of time, you can be sure it wont work for a LONG time.
If each WEB2.0 property is well constructed(good content, plenty of pages and good backlinks). Is like having backlinks from other sites.
I also made many linkwheel for my client website, but it work best if you feed up your spoke, that means you have to build link for your hubs where you have posted content. Again it is very time consuming, you can make linkwheel for only one keyword at a time and you have to prepare different articles for make the wheel. But you can achieve high ranking only by submitting article on major article directories. Another good method of building quality link by linking on .edu and .gov link, but for this you have to research on it.
Its one of those techniques that has to be looked at and constructed vey carefully. We have constructed several for clients and actually provided our members with case studies of how effective they have been.
It depends upon site and your niche also. For example if u need to work on 3-4 keywords, then u can use link wheel. However, if u need to work on 20-25 keywords (travel sites etc.) at once, i would not recommend link wheel Because results via link wheel are very slow and your boss will not wait for that much long period of time. Plus link wheel demands extensive record keeping also.
i simply link my relevant sites together, I have a directory so all sites are listed there. I have a camcorder site and a camera site, those are similar so those have some links in them but I focus mainly on getting each site there own links from external sites. I have a manufacturers Directory but that doesn't go with camcorders so there are not any links. On the google youtube channel they say link from relevant sites.
It has pros and cons, and since link wheels seem to have good results at first but in the long term, you will get penalized for it as Google realizes its just set up for the purpose of backlinks. Link wheels is just like a reciprocal link except it takes longer for the search engines to connect the dots.
How can a Link Wheel be like a reciprocal link? Surely if constructed properly all the links are one way?
They are okay; the problem is the huge amount of time it takes to build up web 2.0 properties, then interlink them. Usually its best to just link directly to your site, vs building up the internet, then linking to yourself.