Are Link Wheels Still Effective?

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For starters, if you’re not familiar with what a link wheel is, head over to George Serrandinho and download the eBook in the this post. Link Wheels are a pretty simple concept in which you build Web 2.0 Properties (with content of course) around your money site. Now, that is briefly explained. George’s eBook will go in a lot more detail, as it’s called “Link Wheels for Dummies”.

Now, whether link wheels are as effective as they once were is quite a controversial topic. I regret not getting in on the whole link wheel thing earlier, because when people first began using them, they were the secret to the SERPs. Using a 6 or 8 spoke link wheel, many people would hit the first page of Google for competitive keywords; it was amazing. Is this the case anymore? Not Quite. Now, don’t get me wrong; link wheels still DO work, but in my opinion, they are just not as effective. For example, I hired a link wheel specialist a few weeks  back to build a link wheel around a local site of mine. I targeted 3 word search phrase, one that only has 200,000 results in Google (which for those of you that don’t know, is considered a pretty low competition keyword).

I sent him a unique, 500 word article, and he spun it into 100 different versions. Reason for this being that the link wheel I ordered was a 100 spoke link wheel, meaning he would be building 100 different blogs (on different platforms), posting a unique article on each, and then linking this to one another in a specific way. He completed the link wheel over the course of a week so it would appear natural to Google. Prior to ordering this link wheel, my site was no where to be found in the SERPs (likely because it was a fairly new domain). Fast forward to a week after the link wheel was completed and my site was at the bottom of Page 2 (position #20) on Google for my keywords. Seems amazing, huh? Well, I thought so too, but then I realized that the keyword was really not a competitive one, and was expecting at least for my site to be at the bottom of Page 1 for.

Now, my point here is that link wheels are still effective, although clearly not as much as they used to be. I hear many people saying “oh, link wheels are dangerous”. Sure, link wheels can be dangerous, but that’s only if you follow the traditional linking pattern (Google will catch on). Mix up the link wheel and you WILL see some results as I did.

If you have any questions about link wheels, don’t be afraid to ask!