Long Term Experiment - The "Foolproof" Linkwheel

johnybh said:

Micallef,
Do you do use other link building tactics besides high pr blog commenting on powerful domains for your 2.0 properties? I f so can you pleas elaborate.

I have gotten into a rut of doing almost nothing but manual blog commenting on high pr **************** blog pages for my money sites with a few forum profiles mixed in which seems to be what you described in your op as your main source of backlinks.

High pr blog commenting is very addicting when you see your money site shoot up to the first page of the serp rather quickly, but as you have also witnessed, this method is like building a house on quicksand as you fall back pretty quick if you do not keep up with your commenting do to the fact that some of the links become no ****, get deleted or the juice on the page gets split between to many links over time which makes them less valuable.

Have you ever considered buying a few strong links to solidify your money sites with ?

Also, would you use the same tactics (holding off adding your money link for a month) in your op if you were just going to use the 2.0 sites as a back link source that does not include interlinking a network (linkwheel)?

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nikoman said:

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.

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johnybh said:

Any updates of how this experiment is going?

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norway000x said:

@ Micallef: I've been following this thread for a while now.
Just came back to check if you had posted something about any actual results...
I see the last post were made 11-19-2010 from MisterGemini, ... 18 days ago ... so I guess no result yet?
I'm very keen to hear if your money sites got on top of SERP after linking together your so called linkroots...
Must be time to link them together soon?

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Micallef said:

No problem, I was meaning to update anyway.

I've come to integrate the mini-net into my everyday SEO activities. For my most profitable keywords, I simply view the construction and promotion of mini sites (in the way described in the original post) as a project that will continue indefinitely. The more assets you control, the more control you can have over a keyword.

So, I've now got some formidable networks going. The average network size is 8, but to really make sure of avoiding the time-stamp trigger, I've slowly built up and still have not finished (up to site 6 or 7 on each network).

Because it's so spaced out in time, the production process is really not draining at-all. Building up the backlinks to the mini sites takes work, but It's easy enough. Most of the sites have between 20 and 40 decent backlinks (combination of manual and scrapebox).

In fact, some of the minisites are beginning to rank for unintended long tails. I've got some confused comments from genuine readers asking me about the incorrect statements and general nonsense I've been idly using for content. This is a good sign that Google is treating my high quality mini-sites as real, trusted websites.

All blogs have been indexed in 3 days or less, none have been taken down, and I've stuck to the original plan for the most part.

The only change is that I have adapted my content production to cope with the high demand for articles. For the first 2 or 3 posts on a mini site, I will use 100% unique content. After this point, I think it's ok to use really well-spun content (I use the best spinner). By "well spun", I mean 70% plus, with 4 levels of nested spinning and at least 40% of the sentences being optional. Spinning to this level of quality is time consuming, but it takes about one third of the time it would take to create the same amount of content the old fashioned way - and it's much less effort-intensive.

So yes, it's all going to plan.

But as for a final result, I can't provide it just yet. This is a long term experiment in every sense of the word. The time hasn't yet come for me to "switch on" the networks. That will come in the next several weeks.

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