: What is technically correct with Link Wheel and Mininet [technique], looking past the ethical (aka "blackhat") nature? Because of the importance of backlinks, and the way that "authority" is calculated,

@Radia820

They are not blackhat tactics. They kinda work. They used to work a lot better.

If you build 1000 of them with a tool, then it 's blackhat. But of course it 's 1000 times more effective so pick your poison. ;-)

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@Lengel546

You'll find most black hat tactics have their roots in white hat practices, it's my understanding that the mini-net and link wheel concepts are taken from main stream media. Most newspapers and magazines own far more then just one publication they have many niche publications and usually somewhere on each of them it says its owned by x or it's an x publication with a link back to the flagship site. So these practices in themselves are not bad, they've been in use since before there was an internet (take a look at some of your print magazines there's almost guaranteed to be some cross promotion).

In my mind when it turns to spam is when you get lazy with it, it's pretty easy to go to textbroker.com buy 5 or 10 articles for less then 0 total and spin them into a few hundred or thousand unique articles and then just change the links around a bit and place them where you want them, so that's how most people do it, and thats why it's generally regarded as spam.

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@Bryan171

I read about link-wheels both the link you posted and this one that is more detailed: www.squidoo.com/LINK_WHEELS

1st of all I would say that link wheels are actually NOT real black hat SEO, they might be called gray hat, because Matt Cutt's himself suggests to spread over web 2.0 sites the existence of your main business/website by writing interesting stuff
So basically by creating articles on web 2.0 (as suggested by the link wheel) you are exactly doing what Matt himself suggests you to do.

The main difference between a link wheel and just spreading on web 2.0 your site existence is that Google does NOT suggest to also create a wheel of links among all the articles you write. :)
But considering that Matt says that is ok to cross-links website as long as they are contents related, well the link wheels technique tells you to write article that are contents related, so is that black hat SEO?! :)

My point is: considering all the effort that you would have to put in writing at least 5 good quality contents articles on 5 different sites, black hat for black hat: wouldn't it take less to spam around forums blogs (the ones you know they don't use nofollow).
Comparing the same amount of time required it's very difficult to say if at the end of the day this link-wheel technique is really worth it, you would have to compare two very similar new sites (with no links at all pointing to them) and attempt to use the link wheel on one site and just a link-building-campaign for the other site. Than see which of the two sites gets a better Google PR.

Telling you the truth, wasting time writing (and reading) about these techniques instead of putting good contents on the websites I build makes me feel really sad and more and more frustrated. But:


considering the type of results Google is returning lately basically strange cross linked websites and the new strange web 2.0 directories (the ones created by users) filled with all sort of crap usually rank better on same search terms than well written site that follows all Google webmaster guidelines and that really are relevant to the searched terms;
and considering that customers (and probably not only mine ones) lately mind only about being on 1st page on Google they seem to be happier with a crappy ugly site as long as is 1st page on Google (the issue is that 1st page contains only 10 results, so I wonder how we will all fit in there);
and considering that the amount of time spent in building a nice looking website with interesting contents it does not seem to be worth the effort anymore, because IMHO for how Google ranks sites (at the end they consider the link references to a site more than its contents, even if Matt says they do balance both) it somehow seems better to spend on SEO the time you would normally spend in making a nice site with interesting contents;


all these considered, I would say SEO has become basically the only thing that really matters, and I agree with you that too many people are cheating, and still IMHO Google does not seem to be able to automatically catch up on this issue and to detect the cheaters, it relies on manual spam report from webmasters, I tried to fill some of them, but I never seen penalties given I've never got a reply.

Well so far I never cheated on Google, but re-reading myself I'm wondering if I am slowly moving to the DARK SIDE of the force.

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