'legitimate' link wheels

[idimmu]

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.....

[bluelinkdesign]

Great Post.

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

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

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

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.

[AlanBleiweiss]

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.

[LawyerlyKit]

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.

[idimmu]

Which news story is that?

[JamesNorquay]

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.