Link Wheels?

[FunkyBears]

Are Link wheels reagarded as Black hat, White hat or even Grey hat SEO?

 

[crossdaz]

Are Link wheels reagarded as Black hat, White hat or even Grey hat SEO?

It's not realy seo - more sem (search engine manipulation) so to answer your question I'd say black hat.

Generally speaking, anything like this which is marketed as a seo tool is best given a wide berth.

 

[Stampy]

I'm not sure why they would be considered black hat. Surely any type of onsite or offsite SEO is trying to manipulate the search engines to place your site higher up the rankings.

Linkwheels are just the latest technique to try and do that. Utilising Web 2.0 properties to provide more powerful backlinks to your site and each other, so that you are increasing the rankings of the spokes in the wheel as well as your own site. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work, unless the Web 2 sites go no follow, and there would be absolutley no reason for google to downgrade you main site as a result of this. It's just like setting up a Squidoo lens, Wordpress blog or Hubpage to link to your main site, but using each site in your wheel to link to each other to push them a bit too.

Probably be a new "technique" to improve your rankings will be out next week!

 

[crossdaz]

It's just like setting up a Squidoo lens, Wordpress blog or Hubpage to link to your main site,

deleted comment - no point arguing

 

[Itani]

I agree with Stampy, I don't think this is black-hat either. Maybe not entirely whitehat , i'd place it in the Grey area. I don't think Google would ban you for having a link wheel.

 

[The Dreaded Lurgy]

Okay I may be thick, but what is a link wheel?

 

[Itani]

A link wheel is basically a list of high authority sites like wordpress, bogger etc linked together and then linked with your main website that you want to rank.
This is just a basic link wheel, there are many advanced methods, alot of people adding their own little method's on top to make the link wheel a bit more powerful.

source:
http://www.hithari.com/my-link-wheel-success-story-serp-boost-from-page-24-to-1

 

[david64]

The hat would largely depend on how it is done. If the sites you are using for links are genuine content then that is white hat, placing links to your "money site" from those sites is grey hat if you would not have done any of this if it wasn't for search engines using links to influence search rankings.

On the other hand, if the sites you are using for links are spun garbage, stolen content etc. (and especially if you are setting up those sites en mass) it is black hat. However any of the links you place on those sites a grey hat SEO.

Basically, anything that you do that would lead a site to be de-indexed or SERPs whacked is black hat. Anything you are doing largely or solely to influence search engines is grey hat. And anything that you would have done to promote your site online if it wasn't for links influencing search rankings is white hat.

 

[Stampy]

When I'm setting up linkwheels I follow this method, always using original content:

1. Post content, ping, social bookmark and submit RSS feeds

2. 1 week later post content, ping, social bookmark

3. 1 week later, add links to money site, linkwheel links, ping

4. 1 week later, add content, ping, social bookmark

 

[Nancy123]

It helps noobs visualize a backlink structure, but there are far better ways to do link schemes that produce better results for much less work.

​

 

[ORDERED WEB]

The stinger here is duplicte content

If the content is duplicated, eventually you will be penalised, if the content isnt duplicated, then you are making hard work of what is a simple job

 

[FunkyBears]

What would you suggest Nancy123 as an easier option?

 

[jacnixon]

The stinger here is duplicte content

If the content is duplicated, eventually you will be penalised, if the content isnt duplicated, then you are making hard work of what is a simple job

The duplicate content penalty is a myth. See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/duplicate-content-and-multiple-site.html

Plus, you can still rank for duplicate content.

 

[Stampy]

The stinger here is duplicte content

If the content is duplicated, eventually you will be penalised, if the content isnt duplicated, then you are making hard work of what is a simple job

I don't use duplicate content, and it isn't hard work , so I must have got lucky (or use some quality outsourcing!).

I don't want to open the debate up about dupliate content, but I do believe that for a link wheel to work, the sites need to be indexed, and there is far more chance of that happening if original content is used.

 

[petera]

God, I didn't even realise this had its own name. I was doing this kind of thing years ago. It does work but for the time it takes to setp up there are more effective things you could be doing

 

[Stampy]

God, I didn't even realise this had its own name. I was doing this kind of thing years ago. It does work but for the time it takes to setp up there are more effective things you could be doing

I use software to create the accounts and make the postings, I just upload my content.

Although I'm interested in the more effective things - feel free to share

 

[I, Brian]

"Hat" is a completely irrelevant question - the real question is whether it is useful and possibly works.

Looking at the diagram, it looks obviously very artificial - it's worth noting that Google are believe to have been link graphing the internet for years, and that includes being able to filter out the impact of artificial patterns.

Personally it looks very lazy and ill-thought out - if someone is going to spend time developing sites on hosted platforms, better to treat them as separate entities for linking purposes - otherwise it would be like shooting fish in a barrel for Google to devalue or penalise the sites if considered to be manipulative. That's presuming existing filters were not already taking effect.

2c.

 

[Deleted member 53208]

Does anyone know if this will work with ordinary non-ranked websites, be it to lesser effect?

 

[GTrotter666]

I agree with I, Brian. Creating a "wheel" seems like a daft thing to be doing. Google can easily decipher that these sites are all linked together in a structure like that. Just seems a great way to send a signal to Google that you have set up a structure like that for manipulating/improving SERPS. Seems crazy to me.