Link Wheels & SEO

I’ve been working on a link wheel for some of F+W’s Numismatic websites lately. What is a link wheel? Simply put, it’s a group of external web pages/micro-sites that link back to your site as well as link to each other once, without any of the external web pages/micro-sites linking to more than one of the other external web pages/micro-sites.

Some of these external content sites allow for “follow” links, some only offer “no follow” links (which doesn’t help with SEO link value), and some offer “follow” links only when you’ve reached a certain score, as determined by the level of content/activity on your page/micro-site.

Here’s a few of the external web pages/micro-sites that I’ve put together:

Squidoo.com: How to SEO Guide – offers “dofollow” links
Squidoo.com: Collecting Coins – offers “dofollow” links
Coinvalues.wetpaint.com – only offers “nofollow” links
Hubpages.com/hubs/coinvalues – offers “dofollow” links once a hub score of 75 is reached.

I’ve also updated our Google Knol pages, which offer “follow” links:

I’ll be adding more pages/sites to this link wheel, and tracking SERP improvements over the course of time.

2011 Update:

Within a year after conducting this experiment, the Numismimaster Coin Price Guide page moved to the bottom of page 1 of Google for the phrase “coin price guide,” and has since climbed up to the top half of page 1 of Google. As a result, we’ve increased revenue dramatically…although not as much as the #1 ranking would provide.

I believe this experiment helped push our rankings up from page 4 to page 1, however additional links from external sites have pushed us further.