A link wheel is an artificial linking strategy to increase the visibility and the positioning of a website or web pages on major search engines. It is a white hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique which means it is approved and recommended by search engines. Link wheel technique helps your website gain higher page rank and pay per click.
How link wheel technique works?
Going by the name, this technique will appear like a loop or a wheel. It consists of a hub page and six properties or neighbours pages which are interconnected to each other and all property pages are connected to the hub page.
For example, the webmaster makes a hub page and links it to six pages which contain the titles in the hub page. All six pages are linked to each other and also to the hub page. This gives the look of a spider in between and the linked pages as the spider web. All six web pages are further sub-linked to another six neighbour pages individually.
Thus, link wheel allows looping or maintaining link wheels within one another. This makes the indexing easier. To make link wheel technique efficient, it is necessary to note that the property web pages should be relevantly linked to the hub page and should be good- quality as well as quantity wise.
A Comparison
A similar feature named Wonder wheel works on the same concept where the searched keyword appears in the middle and the related topics stem out as branches all over the screen. When searched further on any branch, it is sub-branched into more related topics on the respective side of the query.
A link farm is also a search engine optimization technique but it is considered to be an abusive one because it links web pages of almost two different domains, like linking a jewellery web page to a software website.
There are one-way, two-way and three-way linking techniques also where a webpage can be linked to a single, double or more web pages.
Relevant linking is a pre-requisite of link wheel where the linked web pages should be relevant and content compatible to the hub page. Unnecessary, irrelevant or mirror linking can blacklist the website on search engines.
The visibility and the volume of a website searched is measured through a term called link popularity. It measures the number of times a website has been linked to another websites. It measures the popularity on the basis of content and inbound links rather than on huge number of links given to each and every word of the content.
Conclusion
Link wheel being an artificially designed technique needs certain degree of expertise and knowledge. A person unaware of the technique can first take the help of link brokers who are adept at these practices and can create and even rent link wheels to you. After getting accustomed, you can start creating them on your own.