I've been following this forum for a while now and never left any post, but I'm not new to SEO (5 years). I've tried a bunch of strategies and systems/plugins. But now I had to leave a post.
Here is my thoughts about link wheels:
First of all, I saw a comment on this thread that link wheels are hurting your website.
I disagree.
The reason: If they would hurt a site in some way everybody would do link wheels at their competitors to hurt them. Don't you think Google didn't think of that?
Second of all, I once made a link wheel for a money site (that I still have today) using domains that I have bought and hosting them on dedicated IP servers with private name servers for each, then I built backlinks to everyone of them. Guess what happened? All those websites became PR1 within 2 months. I also had huge improvements on my rankings for my money site. But then I cancelled those hosting accounts and deleted my link wheel in fear of hurting my biggest earner. Yup, I fell for that like many.
At first, it didn't hurt me. The reason being simply that my competitors in that niche were not doing link wheels. But then, I get bumped by a competitor that goes out and get the #1 spot. So I do a little bit of link checking on my competitor and I find a really smaller amount of links then my website. But guess what he was doing?
... A Link Wheel!!!
So think what you want about link wheels, but if it does'nt work for you then maybe it's because your competitors are doing more link wheels than you, or bigger link wheels than you. Or maybe it's because you don't backlink them and you don't use unique articles for each. Or maybe it's because you are only doing link wheels and not varying enough your link types. Or maybe it's because your are missing a critical SEO factor on your On-Page optimization, or you are maybe over optimising. So many on-page factors can hurt a website to the point that even if you build links to your site or do link wheels, it won't rank!
Think about this; the only factors that can hurt a website are on-page factors. Because if off-page factors could hurt a website, it would be easier to use this against your competitors.
Start at the basic by optimising your website for on-page factors and you'll find it much easier to rank using the off-page factors. Because really... links are just a part of it.
That's my 2 cents...