Long Term Experiment - The "Foolproof" Linkwheel

You did it again Micallef. Linkwheels concept isn't easy as it ever been.very useful experiment.

dungxvn said:

this is really a lot of work to be done. I noticed one interesting thing that blogs which have lots of content (in my case is 3 posts with over 1000 words, not necessarily unique as I copied from ezine) will be indexed very fast (one day) while blogs even with unique content but fewer words (1 post, 400 words) are very hard to get indexed.

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I've never had a problem getting blogs indexed within a day. I don't think I am doing anything that others aren't? I do disable the Wordpress pinging feature whilst setting it up and then make sure I ping the blog manually, submit to social bookmarking sites, etc.

The sites we do at work also tend to have Webmaster tools in as well. I've heard that's a bad thing for black hat though, is that the case?

MisterGemini said:

This is a pretty decent strategy. Though I think it would be better served by using some better quality content not just for the sake of uniqueness but for sales/commissions. I can understand how hard it is doing that with a variety of sites though.

I think it will work out well. I wish I could join in, but I got too much going on as it is.

Perhaps consider the possibility of updating your linkwheel sites more infrequently? You mentioned 4 articles per site, if you can update them once a week, it can at least keep them in the fresh radar with google.

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Valid point about staying fresh with Google. As regards the content, here's what I'm aiming for:

The blogs are for Google, not humans. They are designed to look as much like authorities as possible - for example, I've been doing things like linking out to authority .gov sites and using <samp> tags.

Should it transpire that some of the blogs end up ranking in their own right for marketable keywords, I will modify the content accordingly. However, it is not overwhelmingly likely that they will rank for my own keywords because in order to stay under the radar, most of the blogs must not look like they are fully optimized for that keyword, just variants of it or more general terms. Furthermore, I do not operate in markets that require "persuasion" at the moment - all my visitors are ready to click on the affiliate link regardless of content.

Talsin said:

Im going to try variant release systems in terms of when content turns up on the blogs I think.

Have some that have articles go up once a week for one - two months, others that have them go up a little bit quicker, then others that go up totally irregularly.

There is no way to have decent unique content on all the sites though (or even a large percentage of them), that would just be way too much to do for too little return. Though for long term projects if particular links do generate real traffic as opposed to just juice maybe it will be worth going back to them and fixing them up at some point in the future.

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Every strategy must vary according to niche, which determines everything. For example, if your niche is trying to persuade people that they need to build bigger muscles, then are are potentially lots of keywords from which you could capture traffic to end up performing the same action. These different keywords could be covered by different blogs in the linkwheel, while still remaining differentiated enough not to raise any red flags.

A clever marketer can get both traffic and relevant links from linkwheels in cases like these. However, the persuasion element will require that content is made for humans, an arduous task.

Other niches are more focused on one keyword - and this limits what you can do with the blogs if you are concerned about the "too many similar blogs at once" trigger. This is the situation I am in, and I've decided to prioritise the link element, and create a general impression of authority. The blogs I am making are very diverse - for example, if my money page was about a particular product in an industry, most of the blogs (but not all) would be about that industry in general, with 1 or 2 articles relating specifically to my central product.

I am leaning on the side of caution at all times. It takes a long time to create these linkwheels, but I think great benefits are still to be had if you manage to trick Google completely and raise no red flags at-all.

Kursal said:

I've never had a problem getting blogs indexed within a day. I don't think I am doing anything that others aren't? I do disable the Wordpress pinging feature whilst setting it up and then make sure I ping the blog manually, submit to social bookmarking sites, etc.

The sites we do at work also tend to have Webmaster tools in as well. I've heard that's a bad thing for black hat though, is that the case?

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Different people will inevitably have different experiences with blog indexing. I recently made a truly impressive looking wordpress.com blog with 2000 words unique content as a launchpad, videos, images, and nothing to distinguish it from a genuine, non-spam blog. I then immediately set about building powerful backlinks from social bookmarking and comment spam (pinged the spam also). It took 3 whole days for it to appear in Google's index (even though I built and pinged multiple links on PR6 pages).

Once I had a Xanga blog with 200 words of machine spun content and it was indexed in 15 minutes. This was clearly an odd case, but it shows the variability of the indexing procedures.

Basically, just think about what might trigger problems, and avoid the triggers. Some of the adaptations I am promoting here are work intensive, and I would not recommend them if I did not believe they were necessary in the majority of cases.

That's pretty damn smart. Nice share!

(+ thanks)

The question is, is the value of these links and the rankings you are gaining worth the time to slowly create and manage to keep all these blogs updated and re hit them swapping links? I can understand if you just have one site to promote, but when you have many it seems like the hand-on portion of trying to do an elaborate linkwheel would not extract a positive ROI.

The question that would stem from that is, is there room in the market for a program to do this automagically, folks are starting to realize the importance of time with SEO, link blasts and ping blasts are not going to do good for your sites, they look extremely un-natural.

LightHouse said:

The question is, is the value of these links and the rankings you are gaining worth the time to slowly create and manage to keep all these blogs updated and re hit them swapping links? I can understand if you just have one site to promote, but when you have many it seems like the hand-on portion of trying to do an elaborate linkwheel would not extract a positive ROI.

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I don't think I agree with you here, it is important to look at thing from both sides. As much as this crackdown might hurt your work efficiency, it could also provide you with way more traffic than before. Why not use this to your advantage? It is hard to make link wheels now just means mediocre marketers wont resort to them, which in tern creates less competition.

Also, as a noob here, I don't really know what this link wheel is, but my guess is that as the name implies, it has some kind of circular structure. This alone looks/seems unnatural to me, are you guys sure google isnt detecting this circular structure?

To me this looks like common sense... lol

This is the first time I read this post. The first time when I found out about linkwheels was about a month ago. I did not even try them because many people was saying they were not working now. So checking the regular strategy people was doing I figure out why google was cracking them out. They were not providing any value to the index so as Micallef I did my own experiments.

FIRST EXPERIMENT

1. I grabbed a bunch of articles on other language (I am bilingual so no problem for me) I translated to english using Google translate. I corrected some grammar mistakes of the engine. That took me about 10 minutes per article.
2. I created each WEB 2.0 property using unique themes. For blogger I downloaded templates, and for wordpress I used any uncommon template.
3. I added ten articles per blog. The articles were unique. Moreover, I posted some images that I grabbed from flirck. So at this points all blogs were looking fantastic.
4. To index them I posted some links on related forums. Since each article of the blogs were informative, I had no problem opening a topic offering some tips shown in the articles. So in less than a week all blogs were fully indexed.
5. Because all blogs were looking good, I decided submitting them to blog directories and believe it or not they were accepted. I even submitted some of them to DMOZ
6. Now, the blogs are getting some traffic from SE so it's time to start the wheel. I am planning linking a blog per week to make it look natural. The money site will receive the juice at the end of the process.

Second Experiment

The first experiment was a success, however it took me a lot of time on translating each article so I decided to use another strategy. Following the instruction from Google webmaster guidelines to avoid duplicated content. I decided to use articles from article directories. The instruction to avoid duplicated content is simple: You must put a link back to the article source.
I did exactly as in the first experiment: Added unique themes, images, links from forums and directories. However, the articles were from article directories. Amazingly, the blogs were fully indexed and accepted to blog directories. So I will start linking the wheel slowly.

On both experiments I added links pointing to sites as wikipedia.

NOTE: If you are thinking what happened with the resource box links on articles from AD, I did not removed them but added nofollow tag. Seem not fair for the article authors, but at least I did not removed them.

Basically, just think about what might trigger problems, and avoid the triggers. Some of the adaptations I am promoting here are work intensive, and I would not recommend them if I did not believe they were necessary in the majority of cases.

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I'm sure there will be a way of automating them eventually, the only insolvable thing with that would be the unique content, which could be paid for when the wheel becomes profitable anyway.

Great post Micallef. I think the best thing you pointed out is the benefit of building your network of sites, but holding off on the links initially. By concentrating on a long term strategy instead of quick results, you have a much better chance of creating a successful network. Put everything in place and only backlink on any sites in which you won't be able to change the links later. Then after all these random seemingly unrelated building blocks have been indexed, go back and start changing backlinks to complete the structure. I think a strategy like that is so close to how natural authority sites get organic backlinks, it would be hard for google to determine which networks are artificial and which are organic.

Lots of good information in this thread. Thanks.

Awesome thread! I wish I had read it before I played around with some free blogs in my linkwheel, but I will be fixing that now. Especially the part about linking to my main site, that is just logic I seem to have totally disregarded when building the sites. Thread saved!

And Btw love your avatar, despite the fact it's the point where that oldman bastard pops Leon in the back of the head... This if for Matilda!

nikoman said:

NOTE: If you are thinking what happened with the resource box links on articles from AD, I did not removed them but added nofollow tag. Seem not fair for the article authors, but at least I did not removed them.

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You can't "PR sculp" anymore. I personally would just leave them as do follow. Currently the PR of your page is divided between all links including no follow. But since their no follow nothing gets sent in terms of link juice and google knows that. I think leaving them as do follow will make them look even more natural (the sites with all the other external links you doing will be pointing to 5+ sites right?).

Oh and, I've also been doing something like this for a while. Unique articles on web 2.0 properties linking to each other and my money sites and a few other relevant authority sites when applicable. So far all pages are indexed but I need a google PR update to see how much linking power they actually have...

Natlex said:

You can't "PR sculp" anymore. I personally would just leave them as do follow. Currently the PR of your page is divided between all links including no follow. But since their no follow nothing gets sent in terms of link juice and google knows that. I think leaving them as do follow will make them look even more natural (the sites with all the other external links you doing will be pointing to 5+ sites right?).

Oh and, I've also been doing something like this for a while. Unique articles on web 2.0 properties linking to each other and my money sites and a few other relevant authority sites when applicable. So far all pages are indexed but I need a google PR update to see how much linking power they actually have...

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That is only applied to links of the same domain. Nofollow links to external sites do not pass pagerank. Otherwise all links would be do follow.

My experiments show that,

For highly competitive niches you need a plenty of link wheels, I focus only on manual link wheel creation,

What i really do is,

1. create blog on a unique web2.0 every time,
2. Update the blog with 5 to 7 duplicate articles(Straight forward copy from ezinearticles)
3. Insert my do follow links with of-course title attribute.
4. Rinse and repeat

I use Google Wonder wheel & Google releted searches tool, To develope my own niche related sites. The ezinearticles are quality and written for humans so i dont bother about anything else.

I dont internally link any of my 2 properties , All the links point to the main site, This leaves no foot prints for google to crack down...

I know If I start social bookmarking for my web2.0 properties it will be more beneficial but lack of time and resources keep me stuck. However the duplicate articles without social bookmarking still do the magic for me atleast.

I personally love this strategy for sure.

Found out about a video course called the link web course, read the sales letter and the guy claims to get high rankings but of course with low compo niches, he talked about random linking and this is what i'm now doing but i'm building the link wheels as a spiders web and the first line of web 2.0 site are sites are sites such as hubpages, squidoo and then go articles and ezine, you tube, now i know some of these sites are no follow but i figure that its best to make it look natural. i then build mini webs around the 1st line of sites with some linking to each other and some linking to my money site, along with social bookmarking and profile links point to the web 2.0 sites and if i do point any links from the web 2.0, the links point to inner pages

I also vary the linking out to other sites such as about.com ehow and wikipedia with some sites having no links going out.

Now all the content is unique so it takes a bit of time with most of it rewritten from article sites, the first article will be between 300 and 500 words, if i post anymore post on the web 2.0 sites, what i do is go to yahoo answers and rewrite a post, even if i add a 100 word post over a course of 10 days its all unique, guys its hard work and i've only started really doing this over the last two weeks so i'm waiting on the results.

Also all of my web 2.0 sites get index within a day or so and the only one i had trouble with was webs, google wants unique content and i really dont think it matters if its 50, 100 or 500 words, just get the spiders visiting your sites with updated content and hopfully their give the link juice.

I'll be interested to see how all these link wheel variations turn out... Maybe some of you would be interested in a thread from a few months ago that was very informative

blackhatworld. com/blackhat-seo/link-building/74797-back-link-diagram-tutorial.html

I can't post links so remove the spaces...

blackhat master said:

My experiments show that,

For highly competitive niches you need a plenty of link wheels, I focus only on manual link wheel creation,

What i really do is,

1. create blog on a unique web2.0 every time,
2. Update the blog with 5 to 7 duplicate articles(Straight forward copy from ezinearticles)
3. Insert my do follow links with of-course title attribute.
4. Rinse and repeat

I use Google Wonder wheel & Google releted searches tool, To develope my own niche related sites. The ezinearticles are quality and written for humans so i dont bother about anything else.

I dont internally link any of my 2 properties , All the links point to the main site, This leaves no foot prints for google to crack down...

I know If I start social bookmarking for my web2.0 properties it will be more beneficial but lack of time and resources keep me stuck. However the duplicate articles without social bookmarking still do the magic for me atleast.

I personally love this strategy for sure.

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If you are not interlinking the profiles or satellite sites, you are not even creating a linkwheel... LOL A linkwheel is a set of links that are interlinked into a broken circle for purposes of passing link juice between them. You are just creating backlinks back to your site.

That being said, i think interlinking anything these days is going to devalue a set of links, straight backlinks is the way to go from what i have seen on my sites. backlinks and links to those backlinks compounding their authority.

That is great insight, Micallef... very thoughtful information.

I can certainly confirm that leaving off links initially and linking out only to authority sites absolutely (IMO) helps gain trust and authority with google. I've been doing this for about 3 months now on about 6 new sites and I have definately noticed a major difference in initial ranking.

I started it because I was all of a sudden struggling to rank quickly these keyword rich domain name, one page sites that in the past would do well quickly. As a test I started putting them up without linking (except to authorities) and than add links after about 45 days. The new links have not hurt my rankings up to this point.

I've personally almost abandoned all automated linking as well. At least for the time being. I'm seeing a very small return on investment (time) lately and spend the time manually link building, with real comments on more handpicked sites. It is a pain in the neck, but I have seen a major impact in site ranking.

While I would not have thought of all the details that the OP did... just about everything seems to ring true with me after reading and thinking about it!

It is encouraging to see the community getting involved in this matter as it really needed clearing up. As has been said, creating any structure of websites involving unique content is either time consuming or expensive.

I'll go into some detail as the motivation I have for building a network like this. I've got a few pages which hold high positions for high competition keywords. These positions were acquired through brute force high power comment spam and other forms of link spam. However, the positions fluctuate periodically, and continuing the standard type linkspam is reaching the limit of its usefulness - this is because I am sitting right under the company that is paying me, and I do not want to push things any further for fear of either beating the original company and upsetting them, or pushing too hard and raising a red flag (this is an unsubstantiated concern).

The ranking fluctuations are proving costly, so I wanted to find a way to stabilize the SERP positioning. This linkwheel style network is the best way I could think up at present. I am hoping that it will "cement" my important pages in place, and also thinking more generally, it's handy to have so-called "web assets" which can be called upon in times of need, such as a serious rank fluctuation. There are other possible benefits too, like these sites ranking in their own right.

The question is, is the value of these links and the rankings you are gaining worth the time to slowly create and manage to keep all these blogs updated and re hit them swapping links? I can understand if you just have one site to promote, but when you have many it seems like the hand-on portion of trying to do an elaborate linkwheel would not extract a positive ROI.

The question that would stem from that is, is there room in the market for a program to do this automagically, folks are starting to realize the importance of time with SEO, link blasts and ping blasts are not going to do good for your sites, they look extremely un-natural.

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The process is labour or cost intensive but as I mentioned above, other options for improving or stabilizing my rankings for some key pages have been exhausted. Some of these key pages are solid gold, and a sustained loss in ranking would be quite catastrophic. I personally view this network as an asset-building insurance policy - much better to have some powerhouse blogs ready to jump in and save an ailing page, than to have to hastily construct a network after a loss in ranking has occurred.

As regards automation, I feel that it would have to come from SEnuke, Scrapebox, conservative xrumer blasts and paid content. In evading trigger 1, it's necessary to spread the effort over time anyway. Spreading the effort over time, organizing it via spreadsheet and just actioning a list of simple tasks each day is much less daunting than throwing up a whole network in a day or two, as I have done in the past. A couple of new sites made, a bit of new content generated, and some supporting links built each day is not too challenging a task for anyone serious about making money online.

Also, as a noob here, I don't really know what this link wheel is, but my guess is that as the name implies, it has some kind of circular structure. This alone looks/seems unnatural to me, are you guys sure google isnt detecting this circular structure?

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Each hub is constructed alone, and is designed to look indistinguishable from a genuine non-spam blog for as long as it takes. After support links have come in and sufficient content has been uploaded over time, you can begin to think about building something like a wheel structure with appropriate interlinking. It will certainly not end up looking like the classic lemonarian linkwheel - it will be a naturalised network that Google will not be able to dismiss out of hand because of all the triggers we have successfully avoided in the construction process.

I think a strategy like that is so close to how natural authority sites get organic backlinks, it would be hard for google to determine which networks are artificial and which are organic.

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Exactly what I was getting at. Google's detection capabilities are impressive, so we have to think about what they are capable of, and jump through the hoops. The process sounds like going completely white-hat but it is not. This is for 3 reasons:

1) The content is made for Google, not humans (unless ranking is later achieved) and is therefore comparatively very quick to produce. Google will be indexing fool's gold, and cannot tell the difference to the required degree of sophistication.

2) An unnatural (but undetectable) bias toward the money page will slowly but distinctively begin to materialize, resulting in ranking benefits which Google would not have otherwise awarded. This is still "gaming" the search engine, we are just carefully sliding under the triggers we can conceive of.

3) The blogs will themselves be supported by a host of powerful backlinks gained using blackhat tactics.

That being said, i think interlinking anything these days is going to devalue a set of links, straight backlinks is the way to go from what i have seen on my sites. backlinks and links to those backlinks compounding their authority.

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Some interlinking can be appropriate and that is what I plan to do eventually with the network I'm building, but it must be naturalized and spaced out in time. If you just interlink everything then yes, it's easy for Google to spot you (trigger 4) but slowly building up the network with some light interlinking can work wonders.

I plan to work out the exact details of what link structure might be appropriate later on in the process, as it's quite a complicated thing to think about.

I've personally almost abandoned all automated linking as well. At least for the time being. I'm seeing a very small return on investment (time) lately and spend the time manually link building, with real comments on more handpicked sites. It is a pain in the neck, but I have seen a major impact in site ranking.

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I feel that this is the best way to give power to any site. Can be a little time consuming but if you are good at it, you come to enjoy it. There's something satisfying about nailing some PR7 that no other spammer has found before.

uniqifier or WPunique what about this? Come on guys these plugins seem do good.

I really don't know where to begin with my post. I really have to say that many of the comments here are great.

I started experimenting with linkwheels a few months back. I even bought website called http://linkwheelpower.com. Nope I am not promoting that website because I hate doing linkwheels for anyone and even myself.

Here are the reasons why I do not like linkwheels:

1. They require allot of labor to create
2. Linkwheels need allot of time to develop them correctly
3. A good linkwheel should be constructed using proxies
4. You need to provide links, pictures, banners and so at a later date
5. You must pay special attention to the **************** links
6. A broken link means you have lost at least 50% of your link juice
7. Some blogging networks like Ning change their **************** to a nofollow
8. Each blog should have only one specific keyword which often means allot of Web 2.0 properties are needed.

This has been my experience. I find them not worth the trouble.

Here is what I do with my SEO Team here in the Philippines. Yes I love this stuff so much I traveled from Canada to the Philippines to have my very own SEO Team. Anyway, I regress.

1. I use both nofollow and **************** in my campaigns. Here are some the things I do with my blogs and many of these do not differ from what others are doing:
   
   
2. I always encourage my team to use proxies. It is the function for one of my team to always look for new proxies with Scrapebox every morning. We use only 10 proxies I purchase on a monthly basis each month to get the proxies from Scrapebox.
   
3. We create multiple Web 2.0 properties using SEnuke. We never place links in a new blog. We never insert pictures, banners or anything that looks like advertising.
   
4. Content in the blogs are created as to provide solid and useful information only. No promotion at all in the initial stages.
   
5. Depending on your niche search for authority sites and place a link or two going to these properties. Make sure you use them as a resource for people visiting your site. Allot of people as mentioned above use Wikipedia.
   
6. We use a separate email with each Web 2.0 property we create.
   
7. Create at least 20 emails so that you can use them for commenting.
   
8. Create an RSS feed to each property.
   
9. Use the Scrapebox add on tool for rapid indexing. You can find a list here for around 7,000 stat sites to post on. Use that at the end of the day. Ping your sites and your RSS feeds. I just had a website indexed in 3 days! That's a website not a blog.

Ok so now you have created your blogs with unique content. Lots of ways to do this and the ones mentioned above are excellent. You can also try Google's translator....go from English to German and so on. Then clean it up and run Best Spinner.

Wait 5 days before you add links. You can always add comments to you blog and ping them while you wait. But be patient and wait to add your links.

After your waiting period you can add your links in the content or profile. You can if you want create your linkwheel at this time. Also, take time to add a link to your facebook and Tweeter accounts. Add some widgets and a voting poll.
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• I like making just a simple T or upside down T formation with my blogs and Web 2.0 properties. I run 3 **************** properties on the top of that T and link both ends to the center and then run the juice down to my Hubpage or whatever. Remember that a Hubpage is nofollow unitil it has 85 points. And remember that Blogger is a nofollow but you can change the nofollow to ****************!
  
• I use the inverted T for nofollow blogs that are combined with **************** blogs. The juice from these **************** blogs ends up going to the nofollow blog and not to your money site. With the regular T of **************** blogs I just send all the juice on down to your money site.

Ok there's lots more I do. I only use Market Samurai, Scrapebox and SEnuke. I am finding Scrapebox less effective nowadays. But a good tool to scrape for high PRs. Do yourself a favor and take time to exploit these high PRs like a professional or with respect..don't spam them...

And we use SEnuke to bookmark all of our Web 3.0 properties.

Ok I didn't mean to hijack this thread. I do hope this fresh look and method with linkwheels works. I really do. I would love to try it again when I have more time.

Good luck to you Micallef and thanks for your share...thanks given.