Does a Link Wheel Still Work for SEO?

About Digital Managed – Local SEO Experts.

Digital Managed specialize in getting businesses to rank higher in Google search results. We follow a tried and proven process that consistently helps businesses to rank better in their local area for both their business name and what they do.

Digital Managed also build WordPress websites, from a single page website, blog, resume profile, landing page etc., through to custom built eCommerce sites ready to sell your goods or services. Plus, we can create social media business pages and generate content for your blog and/or social media posts.

Contact Digital Managed for a free quote. We are Australian owned and do not outsource.

Hackers didn’t help.

Sites that were of a sensitive nature, such as those with adult content or selling adult products, would sometimes even engage hackers. At first, they would insert coding that redirected visitors to their own sites, but this only made it obvious that the site had been hacked and thus the owner of the site would soon use a backup to restore the site to the way it was prior to being hacked. They then switched to leaving the hacked site intact but embedding links into the coding itself, so only search engines would find and crawl the link.

You see, although the original idea of link building was to link between sites with similar content, search engines at the time basically assumed high DA sites would only link to relevant sources and did not cross check to see if that was the case. Gaining backlinks from different domains and various platforms was simply considered to be Link Diversity, and different content had no negative impact.

It was this deviation from the original purpose of link building that actually started to make link wheels a risky idea, i.e. when any of the sites you had linked to lost favour e.g. got hacked and then blacklisted; your site would drop in ranking by association.

Google’s Evolving Algorithms.

Google’s algorithms, particularly Penguin (which targets link spam) and RankBrain (which focuses on understanding user intent), have become much more advanced at detecting unnatural link-building tactics. Search engines now evaluate the quality, relevance, and natural flow of backlinks rather than simply counting the number of links pointing to a website.

Risk of Penalties.

Google is quick to spot unnatural linking patterns. Links between sites with unrelated content is a clear indicator of an attempt to manipulate rankings, and websites that engage in such practices could face consequences, including a drop in rankings or even deindexing.

The answer is to go natural.

Digital Managed have found that although link wheels are now risky, finding ways to naturally build backlinks is still highly beneficial. We have developed a safe and effective way of strengthening your online presence that works within Google’s guidelines. To learn more, read our article “How to safely build backlinks“.