'legitimate' link wheels
-
I was wondering what SEOMoz' thoughts are on the mega legitimate link wheel sites that are out there.
TechMediaNet have been buying up massive news/media sites which arent really monetised (adsense) like http://www.space.com/ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/ livescience.com and others and generating, admittedly good quality, curated content.
Then seeding them with content with backlinks to their money site, toptenreviews.com which in essence is a review site with thousands of pages loaded with affiliate links no better than any of the other site out there. e.g. http://www.livescience.com/9755-bing.html
due to the scale of what they're doing pretty much any keyword search i do with review in it (the last thing i wanted to purchase was a usb 3 hub) ends up with toptenreviews.com dominating the serps
presumably due to the high PR the viral nature of the media sites are working with.
Do you think Google will crack down on this, or do you think it's capitalism in action? TechMediaNet have invested millions in this project and just gotten another $33 million in funding recently.....
-
Great Post.
-
The link wheel only refers to the linking patterns - it has nothing to do with the quality of the links or the quality of the content. If you used crappy content and you didn't link properly, it's no wonder you had ranking instability (although that's normal when it comes to web2.0 link wheels, especially the poorly built ones, as some web2.0 properties get deleted, you lose the link and you lose the rank as well). HQ link wheels, like the ones mentioned by the OP, will never get you in trouble - but you'll need more time / resources to build them or they will be more expensive if you want to purchase such a service
-
This is proof that the link wheel still works. Like idimmu pointed out, all the huge media or news networks use it and if you look carefully, all the big bloggers out there use it. The link wheel is used constantly in one form or another, it's just that people using it don't call it by it's name. I mean, when you, as a big profile blogger / expert do 20 guest posts which all link to one of your websites and then link those guest posts to each other, how do you call that? Or when you own 10+ websites in the same niche (all with high authority and trust) and you link them all together via some blog posts promoting your latest product / service, how do you call that. You call that a link wheel.
And no matter how much people would tell you that link wheels don't work anymore, you have proof the they actually do. But all in moderation (just as with any other link building strategy). High quality stuff will always do good, no matter what changes google brings on. So if you're planning to build an seo link wheel, make sure you do it right - read this for more details on how to build a proper seo link wheel.
-
There is no such thing as a legitimate link wheel. I don't care how high the quality of a site is someone acquires. If they buy it then work on a large scale to back-fill links into old content, that is absolutely against Google's concept of legitimate efforts.
Any site that does this on a big enough scale if caught, will go down. Period. No question.
The question instead is - can they get away with it? Yeah probably. Up until a certain point. I've seen many go down over the past year and a half.
Just like every other shiny object hack, it all comes down to willingness to risk the entire operation.
-
I think it's likely that, for their "paying" site, they're not too bothered about rank - they're probably relying more on social sharing and linking. Otherwise yes, it would seem to be a bad idea. Odd one.
-
Which news story is that?
-
To be honest if you have a high quality site with great content and then you come in and fill it with ads it may not be the best strategy.
In regards to link wheels the strategy has developed over the years, where people have the money site and they build content hubs on say 40 different websites and all spam back links to the main site, it is probably not the best strategy and Google has been aware of it for a long while.
It depends on how high quality the site is if it is going to be hit or not, if the site is really high quality with a huge link profile it may be able to by pass a Google penalty.
In the end of the day Google can crack down at any time no matter how large the site is look at the BBC News story in the media today.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Canonical Tag passes link juice to the original URL?
We are using Canonical tags at almost all the pages of our eCommerce website. We have various sorting options like "High to Low", "Best Sellers", etc., due to this page URLs get change with some dynamic URL parameters. To avoid duplicity, we are using canonical tag on each page which point to the original url. Also, we are using IBM Coremetrics to track traffic and conversions, but to measure referral traffic in Coremetrics, we have to add tracking parameters in the URL. So, while link building we need to share URLs with Coremetrics tracking parameters in the URL, but the canonical of this page is pointing to the original URL. Suppose we have a Page that needs to be shared with Coremetrics tag: domain.com/category-name/?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 This Page has the canonical tag pointing to the original url: domain.com/category-name/ My question is if the URL: domain.com/category-name?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 got shared on other websites, will it pass link juice to the original URL: domain.com/category-name.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ramendra.Singh0 -
Affiliate program links
Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
Juris0 -
What is the best way to boost no. of quality sites linking in?
Analysing my site ranking compared to competitors, I see that our weakness is getting others to share our content and link into it via their own blogs and social media - although I would say our social media activity is pretty good. We have also worked on getting listed free on relevant sites related to our product area (learn spanish in spain) in order to increase sites linking but this is still minute compared to our 2 main competitors. (As a note: paid listings are not totally justifiable for us at this point in time but perhaps in the future we will expand on this). Am I missing something here?
Affiliate Marketing | | sparkit0 -
SEO and Affiliate Links
Hello, We run a travel related website and we started to run our own affilate newtwork to promote the sales of our products. At the moment the affilate links pont to a spacific affilate url in order to tack conversions : abcweb.com/affiliate/nameqaz I'm wondering how is the best way to run a private affilate programm considering SEO: Is there a way yo benefit from those links ? What are the best strategies to do this? If yes, Is there any benefit from redirecting 301 those links to the original page (the one accesible to google and the one we want to rank for) or is it better to use a king of canonical method. Thanks a lot for sharing you experiences , giving your opinion and indicate resources. Best Regards Daria
Affiliate Marketing | | stereo690 -
Will giving a blogger an affiliate url to my site reduce her links' seo value to me?
If a blogger were to write a post about one of my products and link to my product page, would giving her an affiliate url to link to rather than the normal link spoil the seo value of the link? So instead of mysite.com/product-one it would be mysite.com/affiliate/blogger/product-one Google would think... this is a transaction not a vote of confidence?
Affiliate Marketing | | Brocberry0 -
Affiliate code in urls? affiliate link landing pages?
Is it considered a good or bad practice to have the affiliate code present in your affiliate link url's ? (as opposed to disguising them with something like phpbay) Does the general public not scour the hover-over url's of links they click? Also, is there any way of keeping customers on site when they click affiliate links? (via frames or something more modern) Or is that frowned upon by advertisers?
Affiliate Marketing | | Mozzin0 -
Affilate Links
Hi I’m looking for confirmation of my worries about affiliate links to a website I'm working for and hopefully get some ideas of how to solve the problem of having affiliates without losing the strength of links from affiliate web sites. Poplidays.com has an affiliate program with an independant affiliation platform, but it also has a couple of partners who link directly to Poplidays.com from their sites. Poplidays wants to reward the partner sites in the same way as it does affiliates: with a percentage of sales generated by visitors. However as their SEO I don’t want to lose these links. They are from established, quality sites in the same subject area and, in my opinion, have a lot of SEO value. Affiliate links are 302 redirects from urls on the affiliation platform’s domain; something like http://poplidays.affiliation.com/?clientid=123 to www.poplidays.com Can you confirm that replacing a direct link to www.poplidays.com with a 302 redirect of this type will be a bad for Poplidays rankings? Any proof of this from a reliable source that I can quote? The affiliation platform is insisting that there is no negative effect and that no one has ever made a remark like mine before. Any good ideas of how to resolve the problem of rewarding linkers without spoiling the links for SEO? Bearing in mind that Poplidays want to be able to reward sites for visitors who may buy on a later interaction with the site (up to 30-days) and want an automatic report so that the partner can follow his commissions. I’ve tried implementing something through Google Analytics but it wasn’t perfect. Your in house affiliation system is working with links like http://go.seomoz.org/aff_c?offer_id=1&aff_id=1624&url_id=1&file_id=24 that 302 to http://www.seomoz.org/features?affid=1624&txnid=10274208218121120514 Is this a better / perfect solution ? Compared to a direct link to http://www.seomoz.org/features ? Thanks - Neil
Affiliate Marketing | | CarmenImmobilier0 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0