The “Foolproof” Linkwheel
The concept of the linkwheel has now become common knowledge over the whole SEO community. Clever marketers have known about the power of mini-networks for years, and the linkwheel is only one incarnation of the original idea.
It’s a simple thing – get relevant backlinks by making free hosted websites yourself that link to your money page. Add authority and link power to the network by interlinking it and charging up the mini-sites with more links from outside the network.
I’ve been heavily involved with these networks (which we will call linkwheels for expediency) over the past year, and have seen their potential effectiveness for myself many times. In the most successful cases, keywords can be almost completely crowded out by one network, and a lot of money can be made.
On the other hand, I have also seen the potential of these networks to fail spectacularly. This is a big problem, as they are intensive to create in terms of time, labour and money – or all three at once.
Something happened around September / October 2009 which I will call the Google Linkwheel Crackdown. I was heavily engaged in linkwheel production before and after this time, and my success rate was slashed from 80% to less than 40% after October. It was really quite a sudden shift. The crackdown took on several forms:
1) Mini sites would take an exceedingly long time to be indexed, and sometimes never appear in the Google index.
2) Mini sites would fail to rank in their own right.
3) Even after the mini sites were indexed, the desired ranking benefits of a linkwheel would fail to materialise.
That’s the status quo at the moment for linkwheels. Basically, the standard models do not work, and have not worked for some time. A really interesting point to consider is that some of my older networks, which were really quite obvious in terms of link structure and spun content, have remained intact, along with the ranking benefits they produced. From this we can infer that the Google Linkwheel Crackdown is applied at the indexing stage.
I’ve thought long and hard about how to make a linkwheel work in the desired way after the crackdown. Always at hand is the issue of effort vs. reward. Here are some of the triggers Gogle may be using to detect unnatural linkwheel networks:
- Trigger 1: Mulltiple web 2.0 blogs with identical or similar keyword targetting are detected in an improbably short time period
- Trigger 2: Web 2.0 blog detected with only 1 article uploaded, with no updates. Articles are short or very short.
- Trigger 3: Web 2.0 blog detected with regular syntactical errors and / or unusual concentrations of words, suggesting machine spun content.
- Trigger 4: Blogs marked as “questionable” by another trigger link to each other from the start, and all have a link to the same page as-well.
Here’s what I am doing to try and get a functioning network in Google:
- Evading Trigger 1: Mini-sites have widely varied titles, which include keyword in less than 60% of cases. Blog creation and uploads spaced out in time (e.g. an 8 site network would take 12 or 14 days to erect).
- Evading trigger 2: Have at least 4 unique articles per minisite – of at least 500 words each – ready for upload at scheduled points (this can be achieved automatically on most platforms).
- Evading Trigger 3: Make sure all content looks natural. Unfortunately, this means creating it yourself. However, it can be achieved quickly with Dragon naturally speaking and a newspaper for ideas. My current rate is 5000 words of content in 3 hours. The key to making it fast is ignoring all meaning to the articles. They can be gibberish, but as long as none of the flags go up, Google won’t have a clue anything is amiss. They may be smart at detecting cut-out machine spun content, but to judge the semantic value of content requires true AI, an “NP hard” mathematical problem that Google will never crack. Here is an example:
“when assessing the market forcast for <product> in 2010, three research teams were set up. The first team worked closely with the Dutch institute of <product> testing to examine the effects of high-frequency lasers on the internal structures that have been hilighted as unsound in previous studies. The second group was experienced in <product> testing and was therefore cautious about the environmental impacts…”
Product could be anything, from rolex watches to washing powder. I used a newspaper article as inspiration and just spewed that out in a few seconds without pause. Syntactically correct, semantically meaningless, and Google will never be able to tell that it is hastily produced, poor quality content.
Or you could just buy unique content.
- Evading Trigger 4: Quite simple, don’t put any of your links on your blogs when you upload them. Instead, put a link to an authority site in each post. To find them, search “your keyword” inurl:.gov – Google is not expecting spammers to link out to authority sites in their artificial networks. Have patience, and delay the adding of money links for as long as you can afford.
Let’s say we are a month or 6 weeks ahead in time. We have X indexed blogs, with backlink support, which Google now trusts as not being spam. Now, we can go back and carefully begin building the linking and interlinking structure that will send a jolt of power to our all-important money sites.
I am engaged in 12 of these networks at present, and will let you know how the process is going at regular intervals. I welcome and encourage any other SEO specialists to join me in conducting similar experiments.
Published by AdSense tricks
Related posts:
- The PR7 LinkWheel The PR7 LinkWheel Most of us are familiar by now...
- Linkwheel Still Rocks I just used my custom style linkwheel for a pretty...
- How to Build a Link Network of Support Sites A. Avoiding backlink footprints 1. Chances of 2 interlinked sites...
- My LinkWheel i’m not sure if it can be name a link...
- My Whitehat SEO Tutorial for Noobs 1. What are quallity Backlinks? Everyone will tell you is...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.