Are Linkwheels still a good thing to do?

[voitenkos]

Hello , readers.

I have been making a website and trying to promote it now.

I have  these questions:

Are Linkwheels still a good thing to do?

Are they good to do for a new domain site?

Thanks in advance

[Tom-Anthony]

For the amount of effort you spend on such a scheme, you could do a lot better by just trying to think outside the box, and thinking more creatively than the others in your niche. When you are forced to think of a solution that is purely white hat that can achieve or outperform a grey/black approach, you often come up with a solution that whilst maybe not so quick is going to be more sustainable and add value to your users.

I encourage you to think about what would be really awesome content/tools/linkbait for your industry, and what hasn't been done or done well (or not been updated for sometime - this is a good one), etc etc. Then do that. You will not be disappointed you bothered.

[voitenkos]

Well I was thinking on setting up a linkwheel at "bonus" hosts like blogger and squidoo etc and post some nice content (copyscape passed, relevant) there. Not a big one, like 20-25 total hosts. Put some .edu and .gov links to some of the wheel's pages. I suggest that this kind of practice will not do harm. Question is thoug, what kind of benefit will i get if im targeting not-so competitive keywords.

[CPU]

Will they work? Perhaps as the Google Algo's are flawed.

Are they a good thing to do? Probably not as the Panda/Farmer update has shown Google are looking to improve the quality of the results so at some point may roll out an update that impacts them.

[DanDeceuster]

Links are good to have if you want to show up better in search engines, but linkwheels are essentially massive link exchanges that Google does not like. Now, can they catch you? No, not really. Even simply linkwheels are gaming Google right now. Trust me, I know, I get emails all the time about getting involved in one link scheme or another. I know the players, and they rank pretty well.

Google has frowned upon this type of activity, but I haven't seen them really do anything about it, so you do it at your own risk. One problem for Google is tracking them down. Unless a website has 100% of its links come in via exchange of some kind, there's no telling if someone is participating in this or not. I'd say you could probably get away with it as long as you get other forms of links from other sources. I personally don't bother, and Google doesn't like it, so again, it's your own risk, but I've seen it be effective for several websites.