
What is a Link Wheel? Do Link Wheels Still Work for SEO in 2025?
What is a link wheel in SEO? Are link wheels a reliable, sustainable SEO strategy? In short, link wheels have inherent problems, including: You’ll never have enough time or resources to create the high quality backlinks you want Link wheels are limited in their ability to improve your search engine rankings They are expensive in time and money Link wheel are a beast to maintain and will be a content black hole They are the quintessential black hat SEO strategy and can be detected by AI in the linkgraph For a well-rounded SEO campaign, you need more than a link wheel creation . You need professional link building strategy & backlink building services from an SEO agency. However, if you’re interested in building a link wheel creation to run an experiment or just to boost your site a little bit, here’s what you need to know. What is a Link Wheel in SEO? Link wheel (a.k.a “hub and spoke”) can be visualized like a wheel with your main web page in the middle connected to “spokes” that represent backlinks from other websites. In addition to each “spoke” linking to your main site, the “spokes” link to each other. Whether or not a link wheel works depends on how it’s created. Are link wheels just reinvented blog networks? At first glance, you might think a link wheel creation sounds just like a blog network. While the mechanical structures are similar, there are distinct differences. Blog networks are an old, ineffective, black hat SEO tactic that is essentially a link farm. A link farm consists of numerous blogs that publish reciprocal links to each other, usually without considering the content. For example, web pages are linked with anchor text that may not have anything to do with the content of the page, but anchor text is used in an attempt to rank for specific keywords. While blog networks generated fast, short-term rankings in the past, those days are over. Blog networks have been deemed illegal because they junk up the search results (if they rank), don’t provide long-term SEO benefits, and don’t offer value to visitors. Link farms aren’t worth much, if anything, and search engines quickly blacklist websites that appear to be part of a link farm. Link wheel creation, on the other hand, might be part of a blog network, but that blog network is not black hat. The distinction lies in the quality of the content created and how the backlinks are connected. Not all blog networks are black hat The truth is that blog networks aren’t inherently black hat. Black hat blog networks exist solely to create backlinks and will publish any content, often automatically, without editorial review. White hat blog networks are groups of high-quality websites or blogs that provide genuine value to visitors. Link wheel fall into the “white hat” category. Although link wheel can be categorized as “white hat” blog networks, they’re still technically blog networks. They don’t automatically get a high level of respect from search engines. Not because it’s impossible, but because of the time and effort required to earn a high-ranking status for one website. When you have a link wheel with, say, ten websites, you have to put in the time and effort equal to developing ten high-ranking websites. Almost nobody has time for that, which makes most link wheels poor quality. This is why link wheel creation aren’t recommended as a primary SEO strategy. High-quality link wheels require extensive time and effort to create. In fact, link wheel require far more time and effort than building one authoritative website. Essentially, Link wheel creation requires creating and maintaining multiple, individual high-quality authoritative websites. In the end, those websites link to one another, but with specific purpose and intention. Link wheels can be a legitimate, strategic, long-term strategy Although the legitimacy of link wheels is hotly debated, the term “link wheel” only refers to the pattern of linking between websites and says nothing about the quality of the content. There’s no evidence that link wheels with high-quality content don’t work. In fact, if all the sites in a link wheel independently rank high in the search engines, Google won’t penalize those sites for being owned by the same person. There are plenty of websites that publish content that links to each other’s content on a regular basis. Those websites aren’t part of a link wheel – they’re just high-ranking, high-quality sites with amazing resources that people reference on a regular basis. With that said, it’s hard to establish a link wheel creation of that caliber. However, it’s not impossible. Building a link wheel? Prepare for plenty of hard work If you’re going to create a link wheel, be prepared to put in plenty of hard work, time, and money. Link wheels aren’t free or effortless to create. You can’t just pay someone to create your links and content and call it a day. If you pay someone to do work for you, you’ll need to do the planning. Effective link wheels require careful planning and strategic execution beyond what you can do on your days off. If you decide to create one, you’re looking at a full-time job for at least a year or more. Technically, an effective link wheel creation is no different from creating a series of phenomenal websites in the same niche. Although, you can’t just make a bunch of websites and expect results. You’ll need to build each website from the ground up as its own entity with its own market, audience, design, content, link building strategy and purpose. In other words, embarking on the task of creating a link wheel is the same as committing yourself to creating multiple, independent, full-scale website projects. You can benefit from a link wheel, but only when you go all out with each website as its own project. Once each site is established, your backlinks will hold more value. Creating your own link wheel vs. joining an existing link wheel