Creating a link wheel is a very effective SEO strategy that can be used by anyone to improve the rankings of their sites. Essentially, a link wheel leverages the power of highly ranked Web 2.0 sites to build targeted backlinks back to your sites. This works because certain Web 2.0 properties like Hubpages, Squidoo, WordPress, and others allow you to publish your own content on these sites AND allow you to add your own backlinks to this content as well. Google loves these sites and often times your posted content can rank very well on their own. Getting links to your own site from 5-10 of these types of sites is very powerful, and forms the basis of the link wheel strategy.
Here is the classic Link Wheel diagram:
In this Link wheel scenario, every Web 2.0 property links to your main site in the middle, as well as to one other Web 2.0 site in the wheel to form a closed loop. This way, link juice is passed to both your main site and each web 2.0 property enhancing the power of each. I’m personally not too fond of this link wheel configuration because I think it leaves an obvious footprint.
Instead, I like to introduce some randomness to my link wheels like this:
This makes the footprint a little more non-obvious, while still being quite effective. The more properties you can add to your link wheel, the more creative you can be with your linking structure.
What About Content?
To get the most power from this link wheel technique, you want to post articles on these web 2.0 sites that relate to your main site. So if you are promoting Market Samurai for example, you would want to post Market Samurai or keyword research related articles. It’s pretty time consuming to write unique articles to post on all these sites, so usually what I do is post spun articles. You spin your own articles using an article spinner like The Best Spinner. Or if you are quite lazy like myself, you could use a service like The Leading Articles which will give you a daily spun article to use. All you need is one spun seed article from which you can post each unique variation to each site in your link wheel.
Enhancing Your Link Wheels
Most Web 2.0 properties also include their own RSS feeds. Make sure to figure out what they are and then submit these feeds to RSS aggregators like Feedage, Feedagg, and Zimbio. This will help get your content on the Web 2.0 properties indexed faster, and improve their linking power as well. Another thing to try is to incorporate article directories to your link wheel as well. EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticlesBase are some of my favorite article directories to use. Finally, take advantage of social bookmarking sites to bookmark your Web 2.0 properties. You can use a site like Social Marker or a bookmarking tool like Bookmarking Demon which automates the social bookmarking process for you.
Automating Your Link Wheels
When starting out, I encourage you to create your link wheels by hand initially to verify that it works for you. However this is not very scalable and if you have many sites you want to improve your rankings for, you should invest in a more automated solution. My favorite programs to create link wheels right now are SENuke and Magic Submitter. Both these programs automate the process of creating accounts, verifying emails, and submitting your content. They also have their own database of Web 2.0 sites so you don’t have to look around and find these sites yourself. Both programs are very powerful, and well worth the investment.
I hope you can see that creating link wheels is a very powerful technique for boosting your sites rankings. Try it out for yourself and let me know how they work for you.
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{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
I’ve used Ping.FM as a way to build a link wheel. They include most of these services. Thanks for posting this information.
Very informative post, thank you. It’s about time someone came up with a proper auto-link-wheel creator. I’m sure there is a market for it, the exisiting well known ones that you mention need a monthy fee which is just not on for most people.
Thanks for delivering on the name of the title. I can implement this myself now.
Live it LOUD!
Rob
Nice! I’ve got 20 Wordpress blogs online now, and I’m ready to roll! Looks like it will have to be automation for me, though, so I’m gonna have to dig in deep in the pockets for this one.
I hope they are both as good as you say. Great share, mate.
I’ve only ordered a few here and there and they definitely help with SEO, but I’m looking hard at getting SEONuke to help automate my own campaigns.
Great introduction to a link wheel – I agree to put some randomness into it, not link everything to everything else. Thank you.
Thanks – and when I searched for linkwheel – you came up as number one.
Also, add a social bookmarking feature man – I would have passed this on.
This article is really helpful for people who want to understand and experiment with SEO. Understanding fundamentals of link building and building quality links is not easy. Thanks again.
Totally agree with you and Rob that link wheels should be constructed with the element of randomness, but I have also found that if you have at least 1 web 2.0 site that is a no follow this helps with your rankings even more.
Very exciting. I am going to try this! But isn’t it too obvious that ALL the sites is linking to the main site?
If you mix in some other links along with it, then that’s not usually a problem.
Thanks for posting. Two quick questions:
1. Do you submit each site in the linkwheel to Google? If so, do you build the link structure first and then submit, or vice versa?
2. What kind of anchor text should you use for linking to the next spoke? The same keywords you want your main site to rank for? Does it matter?
Hi Jon,
No I don’t submit any sites to Google. I let them get found naturally. I don’t normally use the same keywords to link to the next spoke as I’m not trying to rank the hubs.
@Jon- Never submit to any search engines. It’s like “waving and shouting”, look at me I have a brand new site. Not much chance of getting indexed with any respect. Haha
@Billig iPhone guy. Not if you follow the 2nd picture and link from within the articles, or even “quote” some parts of the article with a link back to the article itself, ie your money site
Let’s give this another shot, Josh… LOL
I’ve never built link wheels in the past; seems to be effective, but time consuming.
Seems as if I have built a link wheel over the past 2 years and it seems to work. Yes, it’s very tedious to do by hand, but then again it’s never too late to automate something which is what computers are for! Will look further into the concept! Thanks!
There has been a ton of talk as to whether or not link wheels are still effective post panda. What have you found?
Hi Mike. My testing has shown that link wheels still work great. Panda is more about the content on your own site.
Great article. I’ve been looking to link wheels lately and they’ve been increasing value of a lot of my sites. They do require quite a bit of working to get going but the results are brilliant. I also agree that traditional link wheels can leave a footprint and look a little “obvious” to the engines.