6 months ago, I wrote the article “The Benefit Of Building A Link Wheel Is Bogus“. Since writing the article, I have had significant search engine traffic for the term “link wheel” without any other self-created content pointing back to it. Over the past month, it is the third most popular page on this blog behind the home page and the first and possibly only Smoking Hot Board Game Deal.
Also since then, I have had a lot of time to think about this strategy for increasing rankings in search engines. If you boil the idea down to its essentials, then it is not an inherently bad idea. It is however still a waste of time as I will show you.
The Essentials
Search engine rankings significantly improve with incoming links from trustworthy sources. Additionally, for any infrequently used phrase there will be few if any trustworthy sources. So, what a linkwheel does is create trustworthy sources which can then link to your target page. Example:
We have 6 wheel spokes and 5 referring sites per spoke. The 5 referring sites on the spoke point to each other in a circle (so each has one incoming and one outgoing link) and all have links that point to the spoke. The 6 wheel spokes operate in the same manner, pointing to each other in a circle (one incoming and one outgoing link) and also point to the target page.
The result is that some unlikely search phrase like “win free board games email signup” now has 6 trustworthy referring sources. Additionally, those 6 trustworthy referring sources are point at page XYZ. Therefore, when somebody search in Google for “win free board games email signup” they will be shown the target page. Beautiful!
Still A Waste Of Time
The problem relies in all of the effort required. First, you need to do keyword research to make sure you have a search phrase that is not currently well covered and that you have a search phrase that has sufficient searches. Second, you need to create the target page. Third, you need to create the wheel spoke pages. Fourth, you need to create the referring authority pages for the spokes. Wow! I wonder how long all of that effort would actually take. Certainly it would take at least 3 hours to do right, possibly longer.
Instead of wasting 3 hours on creating a link wheel, I could make at least one, possibly 2 really good guest blog posts. These guest blog posts could be used by a related blog containing multiple links back to your content. Instead of what you did, you get instant authority for an unlikely search phrase coupled with real human interest from the readers of the blog. Additionally you get to build up a relationship with a blogger in a related field which may begin reading your blog and occasionally linking back to your content.
Conclusion
Don’t waste your time with link wheels. It pollutes the Internet with trash throw away content in an effort to get additional search traffic. Instead concentrate on what you can do to build a lasting presence and build a business that is looking to a future with its customers. Would it make sense to pay somebody to make a link wheel? Once again, I say it is a waste of time and small business owners cannot be spending money on time wasting projects. That needs to wait until you are running a large bureaucratic corporation.
Related posts:
- The Benefit Of Building A Link Wheel Is Bogus
- Attracting And Developing An Audience – Part 3
- Top 5 Benefits Of A Superior Online Brand For Your Blog
- The 5 Most Important Things I Learned About Google PageRank
- Building Trust – Easy As 1-2-3
- 5 Reasons To Consistently Create Unique Content
- One Week Twitter Traffic Experiment Results
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