What is a SEO Link Wheel, and why you should NOT create one?

A link wheel is a black hat SEO technique where you – as a business owner – create several sites and link them to each other in a round-robin fashion. They are purposefully and solely built to manipulate the rankings of a website, which is – pretty much – the textbook definition of Black Hat SEO.

What is a Link Wheel?

A link wheel is a list of websites that you have created, designed to engage the natural emotional responses of the internet, attracting links, social shares, backlinks, and search engine optimization. In an attempt to rank higher on the search engine results pages of a search engine.

In practice, a lot of businesses that create link wheels do so out of a desire to rank higher on Google – rather than to drive customers to their website. But, both goals can be met by creating a link wheel, and they do share common characteristics – click-bait, simplicity, and popularity are the main ones.

Most businesses who create a link wheel are creating multiple websites, then adding the relevant links to the website they are trying to rank for – that way they increase the impact of their respective websites’ links.

At the same time, a lot of businesses do an amazing job at making their websites easy for their visitors to understand, navigate, and use – but still only have a single page website.

This is fine – you are not competing against sites with extremely complex back-ends, or you don’t want to focus your entire SEO strategy on SEO.

But, if you are focusing on creating a site where people can shop for, and buy products, you are probably not going to rank any higher on the search engine results pages. You are simply just not providing enough value.

Google’s Ranking Factors

If you do the basic maths, you are going to know that a link wheel won’t get you any higher on the search engine results pages – in fact, it may even get you lower.

With a link wheel, you have given up a lot of link juice that other websites could have used for ranking. There is no logical reason for doing a link wheel if you are trying to rank higher on Google – just keep it simple.

It’s tempting to try and stack the deck by adding links from blogs and sites that are popular, but they won’t do anything for you.

Even if they did, do you know what would happen?

Google’s ranking algorithm considers your rankings across several different ranking factors, and if they see links from low quality sites, they will drop your site and you will appear lower on the search engine results pages.

And you won’t be able to do anything about it.

If you are a business trying to rank higher on Google, they will analyze your site’s source code, your website’s domain authority, your websites keywords, and your content – and you will be given a ranking penalty if they see something amiss.

For the most part, if you are using a link wheel to rank higher on Google, you aren’t trying to compete against the top 100 websites – you are just trying to be relevant.

There are a lot of great reasons to use a link wheel, if you are trying to rank higher on Google. But, if you are trying to rank your site for something else, and you are trying to find visitors in the most effective way, you should not do a link wheel.

No Link Wheels

In my next post, I’m going to look at the different variations of link rot and how to combat it. If you are looking for a quick guide on how to make Google happy with your website, then don’t miss this post.