One of the new buzzwords in SEO and Internet Marketing these days is the term “Link Wheels”.  Link Wheels are pages that loosely speaking claim to have at least two important kinds of links.  Looking at the first picture (which I grabbed from a random Google image search) you can see that it shows “wheel links” in red, and “money links” in green.  You can see similar things in the other two link wheels examples.

The question that needs to be asked is this: Does this topology of linkages really do anything to boost traffic, or is it wishful thinking based on flawed understanding of how Google and other search engine spiders actually prowl the net and create that “elixir of traffic” known as Page Rank.

One of the explanations of why the wheel works is that the idea is that the spiders rotate around the wheels causing ranking to “flow” from site to site and ultimately to the central site.

Standard Link Wheel

Another Link Wheel

Big Link Wheel

That idea, however is not true.  Spiders are programs that go to a site, evaluate the content, gather all the links, compare those links to a database of links it already knows about, and then makes decisions about which links to traverse next, and what final evaluation to gie the sites and the links between them.

So, what we have here is an idea that in fact is quite meaningless. I’ll tell you why, but it requires a rudimentary understanding of directed graphs, which is what the internet is.

A directed graph is any set of nodes (web pages) and “edges” (links) where the edge has a directionality, which internet links have. There is a rather complex and in-depth mathematical discussion about the internet directed graph and how page rank is computed on it at Wikipedia (here).  In the final analysis there are some important things to understand about which links actually contribute traffic, SEO ranking, and finally page-rank to a site.

The bottom line is that link wheels are really no different than a host of other link topologies and any meaningful ranking you get from any topology is from the direct links to your main site.  Page rank is computed in more simplistic terms in a manner shown int the diagram labeled “link juice”.

Link Juice

Secondary links do not contribute directly to your page-rank, but do so only in a round-about way as they affect that site to which you are linked, and as a pathway for both the spider and the live-human visitor.  The problem with this logic is that the “spokes” are already heavily linked by tens of thousands of other pages, so you little extra link here really adds nothing in the way of getting a spider to rank you higher, and is also meaningless for the human – as they have presumable already read your article so a link to the same article on another site is not really going to be useful to them.

Add to that the sophistication of today’s spiders and their content comparisons, even those show “spin” their articles are going to have very little gain from these “spoke to spoke”linkages.

This spoke-to-spoke linkages in a link-wheel is supposed to be the “discovery” that makes the wheel so powerful.  It is not really is not that useful at all, and is a waste of your time if you are setting them up by hand.

Rank Sources

What really matters are the direct links and some other aspects that rank your site as illustrated with this picture labeled “Rank Sources”.

You might still make the argument that the spoke to spoke links help by distributing the content around and thereby cause the search spider to take that route and see the content – however the spider rates the link importance more due to the importance of the site it comes from.  What that means is that your juice comes from the spokes themselves, not the interconnectedness between those spokes.

The real juice comes from the importance of the site, the freshness and relevance of the content, the keywords in the content and the how often these keywords are searched for, and the number of times the web-site is visited and then clicked on directly from Google search page url.

The algorithm for page rank that is currently published over at Wikipedia has been highly modified in actual practice by Google with many proprietary filters and other formulas and has a host of additional controls that allows Google to penalize or ban certain practices from contributing to page rank – we can also assume therefore that there are formulas that contribute more than “normal” for practices they want to encourage.

With this in mind, I submit that Google is well aware of those who try to game the system by creating these wheels – but even if they are not, if last time their spider crawled the, and  your site was not there, and the next time it crawls the net and your new site is there with thousands of links to it, that is going to be a tip-off on what you are doing.

So a better solution to setting up you marketing pages is to concentrate on the spokes themselves – get linkages from powerful sites to you money site using great content, lots of comments on great blogs and forums, lots of feed aggregators, and add these over time.

That last point is important as to increase of page-rank and and avoidance of Google bans – build the links over time.  This way you do not suddenly appear full-fledged with thousands of links because that is a dead giveaway to Google and others that you are a marketer pushing a product.  This is a perception problem, it does not matter how good your product is, Google is notorious for penalizing this.  So build over time, and build multiple sites for multiple products – or different versions and bonus packages of the same product and eventually cross link them.  This looks more organic and will raise your SEO rankings in a more solid and long lasting manner.

David T. McKee