Can Link Wheels Be Effective?
This has been a hotly contested debate over the past year as webmasters continue to try to find new ways to improve their rankings in SERPs. The basic premise of a link wheel goes like this. You set up 5-10 hosted blogs on sites like Blogger, Wordpress, Squidoo, etc. These are called the ’spokes’. Then you place a prominent link on each one of them to your main site that you are trying to promote, called your’hub’. You also place a link on each ’spoke’ to another ’spoke’. This configuration in and of itself is practically useless. Links to your site on these 3rd party hosted blogs, having no inherent traffic, no backlinks and no page rank are worthless. Unless, of course, you actively promote each ’spoke’ in your wheel. If you build links for each one of your ’spokes’ through traditional linkwheel techniques, such as blog commenting, forum posting, social bookmarking, etc then you build up traffic and popularity of these sites, which in turn pass some traffic and popularity on to your main target site. Now instead of promoting one site, you have got six sites to promote. In this case, you not only have to promote each ‘spoke’ but also its content.