Over at associateprograms.com, there’s a discussion about linkwheels, so I thought I’d add my two pence.
What’s a link wheel? Well, traditionally a linkwheel is when you take multiple pages on Web 2.0 properties and link them back to your main site as well as interlinking them so that each Web 2.0 property points to the next “spoke” in the wheel. When you look at it as a diagram, the link structure looks like a wheel.
The idea behind linkwheels is that Google will index the Web2.0 properties and notice that they link to your main site, which will gain positions in the search engine rankings because of the extra backlinks from popular Web 2.0 properties.
However, linkwheels are also popular with black hat SEO people who use the fact that the web 2.0 properties have millions of backlinks to fire spammy profile links and comment links at their pages on the web2.0 sites. They think that the spam links won’t be a problem for the web2.0 site whereas they would almost certainly get a new site penalised. So, Google launched a crackdown on such link schemes and can now almost certainly find and devalue any “traditional” link wheels.
So I don’t recommend using a standard link wheel structure. What I do is take web2.0 pages, add some original content, then link them to my main pages. I don’t link the web2.0 pages to other web2.0 pages, so I’m not forming a wheel. With my system, it looks more like some people have decided to echo my news/thoughts on separate web 2.0 sites rather than me engineering a linkwheel backlinking system.