LinkWheel – Generating backlinks to your site

Getting links to a new blog can take time, particularly for certain types of blogs (e.g. a company blog). Though it is important to try and build incoming links to your blog and it’s articles to increase your presence in the search engines.

If you don’t have the time to do link building yourself then a service such as LinkWheel might interest you. LinkWheel is run by Michael Smith, who also happens to run the marketing blog MetaFever and paid link services such as MonsterClicks and Paid Backlinks; as well as the content writing service MadContent.

What is a Link Wheel?

A link wheel is a series of web 2.0 sites which link to each other and to one other site i.e. the site you are trying to promote. Link wheels use free accounts on services such as Squidoo, Blogger, WordPress.com and Jimdo to build links to each other and to the site(s) they are trying to promote.

LinkWheel.net claim to maintain over 60 of these accounts across 5 dedicated ip addresses. They use these accounts to provide links their customers websites.

What do LinkWheel.net offer?

LinkWheel promote themselves as a premium link wheel service. They offer 7 different packages in total: 4 one time link wheel services and 3 monthly options. Their main strength over other services is that all link building is done manually rather than relying on software.

Each of their properties is submitted to over a RSS aggregators and every new article is mass pinged to ensure it’s indexed quickly.

The four one time services cost:

• 7 Web 2.0 Properties and 7 Unique Articles (PR 4 – PR 9) = $65
• 15 Web 2.0 Properties and 15 Unique Articles (PR 4 – PR 9) = $100
• 25 Web 2.0 Properties and 25 Unique Articles (PR 4 – PR 9) = $145
• 18 Web 2.0 Properties and 18 Unique Articles(PR 6 – PR 9) = $65

In addition to articles, they provide one unique video which is uploaded to youtube and used on all of their sites. They also guarantee to link twice to your blog within the article and use at least 8 of your chosen keywords.

They also offer monthly services to those who want to really increase the number of links to their blog.

• 7 Web 2.0 Properties + 21 Unique Articles a month = $165pm
• 15 Web 2.0 Properties + 45 Unique Articles a month = $255pm
• 25 Web 2.0 Properties + 75 Unique Articles a month = $375pm

LinkWheel promise to put more love into the monthly campaigns and spend more time making the profile personal i.e. make it look less like a link wheel.

According to their Frequently Asked Questions page ‘most link wheel development is done with in 5 – 7 business days’. You will be given access to all profile accounts and you will also get a report in an excel spreadsheet which details everything which was done.

In addition to the main packages, you can also purchase 100 social bookmarks and blog comments at the checkout.

Are Link Wheel services worth it?

It’s sometimes difficult to say whether a service or not is worth it as it somewhat subjective. I would personally prefer to build incoming links myself by writing articles or hiring others to do so and then place those articles on sites like Squidoo or HubPages. Though it is time consuming to write articles yourself and it can also take time to organise others to do so, which is why people with very little time on their hands might be interested in a service like this.

Let’s discuss the articles first. Do not expect these articles to be of a high quality. It is very unlikely that they will be linked to by anyone other than the person writing the article themselves. I tried some cheap article writing services a year or so ago for a site I was developing and the standard was awful, but you do get what you pay for.

The article are original…..well, kind of. If you download their 6 page ebook (which explains what link wheels are) you will get a better idea of how they operate (a pop up for the book appears when you visit the home page). They spend a few hours writing an original article and then use DataPresser, a script which changes certain words and the way sentences are structured, to spin out up to 1,000 variations of the same article. They ensure that only 25 variations are used before they write a new article.

Technically, these articles are original and should not come up as duplicate content on a search engine, but in reality these articles are all the same which is why very few people will link to them. I’ve seen some pages on the web who have blatantly used a script like this as a lot of the content just didn’t make any sense.

It isn’t clear whether articles are being outsourced to writers in Countries like India, though the Link Wheel website itself is littered with many basic grammar errors so I don’t expect any articles you purchase from them to be any different.

But this service isn’t really about the articles, it’s all about the links. More incoming links means more traffic and an improved presence in the search engines. The quality of traffic from those links is something which I greatly doubt as it appears they are using variations of the same articles for all clients, therefore it is unlikely that the article will be on a topic which is closely related to your blog. Though if the campaign does increase your rankings in the search engines then it may be worth it.

It’s worth pointing out at this time that this is a paid review and I was not provided with a campaign in order to test the service therefore my opinion of the site is based upon the information on the site and the ebook and the general idea of a paying for links within articles.

I don’t think that this type of service is suitable for bloggers. Blogs are all about providing good content to your readers so why would you spend money for poor to average quality unoriginal articles on other sites to generate some incoming links when you could pay good writers to produce excellent original articles which others will want to link to. It just isn’t worth it.

There is a need for this kind of thing though. My opinion so far has been based on whether this service is suitable for bloggers and in that respect, I don’t think it is. However, there are types of websites which would really benefit from this type of service. For example, PPC marketers could use the service to drive traffic to their landing pages.

Compared to buying links for PageRank juice on sites like Text Link Ads, LinkWheel.net could prove to be a real money saver. Their basic package provides 7 articles with 2 links to your site for $65. This works out to be $4.64 per link, which is about the same price you would pay for a PR 3 link. However, link selling sites charge around $5 per link per month whereas a link within a link wheel article will be there for as long as the web 2.0 account is active.

So I do think that those who purchase links for PageRank purposes should look into trying out a service like LinkWheel.

Overview

I really don’t think any blogger would get value from purchasing a package from LinkWheel.net. The money would be better spent hiring a good writer to write great articles on your own blog as this will offer content to your readers and generate incoming links naturally.

As I pointed out though, many types of websites, services and products are hard to promote, therefore the service may prove to be much more beneficial to them. This is especially true if they are selling a product as they may just need 1 or 2 sales to break even. So it could be a great alternative to PPC services such as Google Adwords.

Don’t be misled by the number of unique articles you are getting. The most important thing LinkWheel are selling is links back to your site. So if you are interested in purchasing their package, look at how many unique links you will get and compare it to alternative ways of generating those links.

Link: LinkWheel

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on November 15th, 2009 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
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