Understanding the Link Wheel Strategy in 2024

What is a Link Wheel in SEO?

Are link wheels a reliable, sustainable SEO strategy? In short, link wheels have inherent problems, including:

• You’ll never have enough time or resources to create the high-quality backlinks you want
• Link wheels are limited in their ability to improve your search engine rankings.
• They are expensive in time and money.
• Link wheels are a beast to maintain and will be a content black hole
• They are the quintessential black hat SEO strategy that AI can detect in the link graph.

For a well-rounded SEO campaign, you need more than a link wheel creation.

It would be best if you had a professional link-building strategy & and building services from the best SEO company in India.

What is a Link Wheel in SEO?

ink wheel (a.k.a “hub and spoke”) can be visualized like a wheel with your main web page in the middle connected to “spokes” that represent backlinks from other websites.

In addition to each “spoke” linking to your main site, the “spokes” link to each other. Whether or not a link wheel works depends on how it’s created.

Are Link Wheels Just Reinvented Blog Networks?

At first glance, you might think a link wheel creation sounds just like a blog network. While the mechanical structures are similar, there are distinct differences.

Blog networks are an old, ineffective, black-hat SEO tactic that is essentially a link farm. A link farm consists of numerous blogs that publish reciprocal links to each other, usually without considering the content. For example, web pages are linked with anchor text that may not have anything to do with the content of the page, but anchor text is used in an attempt to rank for specific keywords.

While blog networks generated fast, short-term rankings in the past, those days are over. Blog networks have been deemed illegal because they junk up the search results (if they rank), don’t provide long-term SEO benefits, and don’t offer value to visitors.

Link farms aren’t worth much, if anything and search engines quickly blacklist websites that appear to be part of a link farm. Link wheel creation, on the other hand, might be part of a blog network, but that blog network is not a black hat. The distinction lies in the quality of the content created and how the backlinks are connected.

Not All Blog Networks Are Black Hat

The truth is that blog networks aren’t inherently black hats. Black hat blog networks exist solely to create backlinks and will publish any content, often automatically, without editorial review. White hat blog networks are groups of high-quality websites or blogs that provide genuine value to visitors. The link wheel falls into the “white hat” category.

Although link wheels can be categorized as “white hat” blog networks, they’re still technically blog networks. They don’t automatically get a high level of respect from search engines. Not because it’s impossible, but because of the time and effort required to earn a high-ranking status for one website.

When you have a link wheel with, say, ten websites, you have to put in the time and effort equal to developing ten high-ranking websites. Almost nobody has time for that, which makes most link wheels poor quality. This is why link wheel creation isn’t recommended as a primary SEO strategy.

High-quality link wheels require extensive time and effort to create. A link wheel requires far more time and effort than building one authoritative website. Essentially, Link wheel creation requires creating and maintaining multiple, individual high-quality authoritative websites. In the end, those websites link to one another, but with specific purposes and intentions.

Link Wheels Can BE a Legitimate, Strategic, Long-Term Strategy

Although the legitimacy of link wheels is hotly debated, the term “link wheel” only refers to the pattern of linking between websites and says nothing about the quality of the content. There’s no evidence that link wheels with high-quality content don’t work.

If all the sites in a link wheel independently rank high in the search engines, Google won’t penalize those sites for being owned by the same person.

There are plenty of websites that publish content that links to each other’s content regularly. Those websites aren’t part of a link wheel – they’re just high-ranking, high-quality sites with amazing resources that people reference regularly. With that said, it’s hard to establish a link wheel creation of that caliber. However, it’s not impossible.

Building a Link Wheel? Prepare For Plenty Of Hard Work

If you’re going to create a link wheel, be prepared to put in plenty of hard work, time, and money. Link wheels aren’t free or effortless to create. You can’t just pay someone to create your links and content and call it a day. If you pay someone to do work for you, you’ll need to do the planning.

Effective link wheels require careful planning and strategic execution beyond what you can do on your days off. If you decide to create one, you’re looking at a full-time job for at least a year or more.

Technically, an effective link wheel creation is no different from creating a series of phenomenal websites in the same niche. Although, you can’t just make a bunch of websites and expect results. You’ll need to build each website from the ground up as its entity with its market, audience, design, content, link-building strategy, and purpose.

Benefits You’ll Get From Building a Link Wheel

You’ll Save Money on SEO Services

Hiring an SEO specialist to generate your entire backlink profile will cost money on a regular, long-term basis. You’ll need a monthly budget to create an effective SEO campaign of any size.

Whether you build your backlinks or pay an agency, it will cost money. If you want your site to rank in the Search Engine Results pages (SERPs), you can’t get around building backlinks, but you can save money by building a link wheel.

If you’re not sure how to get started building a link wheel, you can always hire someone to create one for you to get the ball rolling. Once your link wheel is established you can create your content, and links, and go the DIY SEO route. As long as you understand SEO and can put in the time, a DIY link wheel project should yield some results

You Can Drop Most Of Your Social Media Efforts

Are you trying to work social media to generate traffic? Social media is more of a lead-generating tool than a method to generate traffic or sales. To get traffic and sales you need to capture and hold attention. That’s not easy to do within a social media application. Most people are highly distracted when using social media; they’re not usually giving their full attention to what they’re interacting with, even messages from friends.

An article published on Computer World details the high level of distraction faced by mobile users. One of the studies discussed in the article came out of Florida State University. This particular study found that people become distracted just by hearing smartphone notifications in their pockets. What the article doesn’t point out is that most of those notifications are from social media apps.

White Hat Link Wheels Won’t Get Penalized

Perhaps the best benefit of building a legitimate link wheel is that you won’t get penalized. Google, Bing, and other search engines don’t care who owns a website. You could own 100 websites or even 500 websites for all they care.

No matter how many websites you own, you won’t get penalized for playing by the rules. As long as all of your sites provide valuable content and use only white hat SEO link-building strategies to generate backlinks, you’re golden. However, search engine algorithms can pick up on the relationship between websites based on reciprocal links. Too many reciprocal links can tank your efforts.

Conclusion