What was the initial purpose of a link wheel?

I have only ever made one link wheel and that was to my first ever site when I first started SEO about 3 months ago. Other than the linkwheel, I have a lot of other types of backlinks so i can't really say if the linkwheel has helped or if it has had a negative impact.

After learning a bit more about SEO, I stopped building linkwheels and instead I build "link push" which means no web 2.0 site is interlinked. I have never built another link wheel since my first site and all my other sites seem to be ranking fine with link push at the moment.

The reason why I never built another linkwheel is because I thought it has too much footprint, surely Google will know about a linkwheel if it sees a number of web 2.0 sites which have money site links which are connected to other web 2.0 sites which also have money site links. Surely Google will know that this is a linkwheel and therefore wouldn't it either be disregarded, or devalued?

I never actually learned the reason behind interlinking sites in a wheel structure and I hope somebody on here can clear things up a bit for me. Also, does anybody still use link wheels and do you think they are still effective? Thanks in advanced, Ravi

Back in the day, I think that the link juice would increase each time through the loop (wheel). I think G came up with an algo change to escape the loop though. But that's was in the FIRST days of the wheel. Not 100% sure on that though.

The original idea was to have interlinking sites point at your site and give it the air of authority. Imagine that something news worthy breaks out... and the importance of it is judged by how many different stations talk about it. On the web it's more about how many people share that information. It was a sign of social before anyone even knew the word social signal. The tiered pyramids came out of that concept.

Having your link wheel be open and tiered is probably the best of both worlds...

Regards,

Tom

Building link wheels was just a method used to rank site's higher . I stop building multiple link wheels myself and stared linking only a few together.

Great thing about SEO is there is so many different ways to get Rank and Backlinks. Trial and Error is only way you will know for sure what is best for you.

Thanks for the replies guys, maybe it may help my sites if I build a few small open link wheels for extra diversity.