'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
-
Guilty of keyword cannibalization. What's the best way to fix it without losing link juice?
Hi guys, I'm new here but I already spent hours reading the forums. I didn't post before because I didn't feel the need to, but today it's different. I don't want to take fixing steps that are not optimal for my website situation. So here's the problem : I am working on an affiliate website that is growing day after day and is already profitable. It is not by any mean a thin affiliate site. It's a french language website with product reviews on it. Right now there is 1 main page (hero page) per review in which I describe the products, put affiliate links, present useful information, etc. These pages have a good word count and I am targeting 1-2 main keywords on them which I consider a good practice. Couple of months ago I decided to add a product page for each one (normally it's 5 products per review) so I added 5 more page per review, targeting product names as new keywords. Problem is that : Product names are very similar to the main keywords (keyword cannibalization problem) There is very little added information on the product page when you compare it to the hero page (too thin) A lot of information is repeated on each of the product pages. I think this is bad. So I decided to keep only the hero pages to keep more link juice, avoid keyword cannibalization, improve page authority and get more content on one single page (only information that was not repeated have been added to hero page). I removed ALL THE LINKS to product pages (from the hero page). So now for my questions : Is it better to keep the product pages in my sitemap or to delete them right away? Is it better to let the product pages die by themselves over time or to 301 redirect all the product pages to hero page to keep link juice? The next question is a bit more complicated. Hope you guys understand what I mean. Considering that product pages are now gone, this will for sure weaken my bounce rate % because only hero page with good/deep information will be accessible to visitors (there is not a lot of internal links in each review, except to other, RELATED reviews). Is setting up goals in google analytics + telling google that it should consider a click on an affiliate link as a NEW PAGE VIEW (like it would act for a click on a link of a product on my own domain) will help for SERPs and SEO?? Or it will just help ME to see a lower bounce rate and setting goals? In other words, is tracking these links and let google see them as new pages clicks will help for the page rankings or not? Because from what I am understanding, a good bounce rate helps for rankings. If the changes made to avoid keyword cannibalization work, when could I potentially see the effects/benefits in the SERPs and trafic?
Affiliate Marketing | | benoit_20181 -
Blocking external links in Robots.txt - need advice on Best Practice
I look after an affiliate site that is doing quite well in the search rankings. We've been doing a review of our practices and one thing that has cropped up is our robots.txt. In it, we disallow Google from crawling external links. This used to be best practice in the affiliate industry a couple of years ago, but I wanted to know if this is still the case, and what the implications are if we were to: a/ leave it as is? b/ allow crawling? Thanks in advance.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ben_Malkin_Develo0 -
Setting up external link goals in GA
I have recently switched all my travel affiliate links to TripAdvisor using their javascript code that converts the natural links (direct links to TA URLs) to affiliate links. I have set up goal tracking in GA to try to put a monetary value on clicks through to these links (based on the known conversion rate to commissionable bookings) but GA is over-reporting the goals by a very large margin. I'm wondering what I've done wrong. The first screen shot below is of the goal settings I used in GA. The second screenshot shows that GA is reporting 7125 goal completions since I set up the goal on 7 August. The third screenshot shows the actual number of GA events recorded on outbound clicks to TA URLs in the same period, which is just 97. So the goal completions being recorded far exceed the actual goal completions, but I'm not sure why. I know I've done something wrong but as this is the first time I've used goals, I'd appreciate some help to see what I've done wrong. Thank you. 3f7dc3de6f9f1373d47994144a5cb016 56aa39130a7d54b07d8f2ce9cf1d7fb0 35ee827275928ca8c4d4c941f0672ef8
Affiliate Marketing | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
What impact do affiliate links have on SEO
We commonly reference engineering standards on our site (because half our products are known and searched for by those standard names) and have just signed up as an affiliate to an organisation that sell the standards. Which seems a nice match We're going through and making sure all are no follow now because that seems the general advice - but should we be doing anything else? Yoast says you should mask affiliate links - https://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/ - but that was from 2010. Matt Cutts is fairly clear on nonfollow - http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06 - but not on whether it affects SERPS Does it? And what is the best way to handle it? This is a typical example of a page where we would have an affiliate link or two. http://www.oakleysteel.co.uk/fake-mill-certificates-en10168
Affiliate Marketing | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Amazon Links destroyed my rankings, I removed them, will my site recover?
Hello, Last week I got the glorious idea to put amazon affiliate links on my website. I didn't put a rel=nofollow on them or deindex the pages they were on. Precisely I put some reviews and 10 different amazon links on one page and I put that into my navigation so all inner pages were linking to that page. When Google crawled my page again, I had a 60% traffic drop. 3 days later when I found out what caused this (amazon links) I completely removed the site containing those links and removed all links to that page from my site. Now my rankings are still down, will my site recover from this or is it lost? And how long would you think it'll take?
Affiliate Marketing | | SeeSharp10 -
Which affiliate programs pass the best SEO value through their links?
How good is Google at detecting the affiliate nature of those links? How does this rate as a linkbuilding strategy?
Affiliate Marketing | | menachemp0 -
Important question on affiliate links
The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window. This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page." Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit. My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | DanDeceuster0 -
In search of the perfect SEO affiliate ID'd URL
Hi, I'm building our own affilaite system. I want to make sure I get as much SEO benifit from affiliate links as possible so I am in search of the perfect solution. My thoughts after doing a bit of research are to do the following - using the # as my identifier: 1/. Use an ID like www.mysite.com/#A123 2/. Redirect via 301 these urls to www.mysite.com Any thoughts on this, or other things I should be thinking of with regard so building an affilaite system that has strong SEO benifits? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | James770