Link Wheels, Networks and Google

[addz123]

I'm interested in learning about the potential effects of building link wheels and inter-linking a number of your own sites to help boost rankins in seo.

Let's say that I have 20+ sites in the poker/betting/gambling niche. All of these sites are good quality with 20+ pages of content updated regularly and lots of inbound links from other sources.

I just want to know what would "potentially" happen if I started inter-linking a bunch of my own sites like this. Not going to create a link farm on my homepages, but for argument's sake let's just say I pop in 3 sidebar links on each of my sites across my network, or even one or two homepage links on every site.

Would I risk compromising my entire network and getting penalties by doing this? I am very aware of others in the past who have footer links to their own sites and then get penalised. Hence I have very much limited inter-linking between my own sites, at least on homepage/sidebar/footer anyway, and only where it was relevant.

Also, does hosting on the same IP adress add much more risk. Quite a few of my sites are in the same IP adress/root folders, so interested to hear just how big a deal this is.

I'd just also like to point out that linking between a network of sites isn't always spammy. Look at the PokerSOurce network, they seem to be linking to all of their sites at the top of the page such as pocket5s, pokersource, PND.

I'm also aware of a guy on this forum who does it with his sites be it on the sidebar or footer.

Thanks,
Adam

[MJ]

People seem to get away with it - so
E to a large degree, I've personally gotten spanked everytime I've tried it no matter how natural or relevant it was, so now I do zero of it - but all my sites are transparently me and I have more than most people so that may be a factor.

[Sebastian]

I learned the hard way to stay away from link schemes...

I would never try this in a million years.

[Peter Willis]

Linking to your own stuff is just as acceptable as linking to anyone else's stuff... so long as it's natural. Google's more than happy if you were to link to a site/story on any other site if it adds value to your own site/story. If you start linking questionably (i.e. obvious anchor text targetting) then you leave your self open to penalties.

Likewise, Footer/Sidebar "network" links are fine in my opinion so long as they are clearly disclosed as such and don't try to be anchor text focused. Sky have been doing it for years and don't exactly seem to be suffering for it. Sky Sports | Sport News

[MPC]

A lot of people do it. Generally speaking, if you don't link excessively, link to related content, you are minimising the chances of being penalised. Think of it this way. Let's say I own a custom build poker calculator that is really original and useful on site A. On site B I write an article about pot odds for Omaha, something that my site A calculator can do, then there is nothing wrong in linking to it. Visitors of site B will find value in the calculator from site A. I should not have to deprive them of a good ressources simply because I happen to own both sites.

So generlaly speaking you should be OK, but as MJ pointed out google can still be an unreasonable bitch, just like in any marriage. Like it or not, we are married to google, and google wears the pants.

MJ, have you been fornicating with Bing? Maybe that's why! Haha!

[leporello]

Linkwheels were effective and can be when you do sufficient link building for the spokes and link your money site(s) in the right way. I've never tried it with just gambling sites, but using trasitional web 2.0 properties works well when done correctly.

[makwaugh]

Link Wheels is one of the way to build backlinks to your website.It is very useful to rank a site but its pretty time consuming.I think Link Wheel is best thing for improve your Back links it's help full for getting SERP as well Page Rank for making wheel try to collect quality links via all network!!! one of the most imaginative ways of using web 2.0 web sites.