Many SEOs manually map or semi-manually map their backlinks structures. These maps look very interesting, to say the least. Some look like a Carlos Castaneda flashback while others are so damn predictable it’s scary–specially for the clients of such SEO “expertise”. Predictablity, in SEO, is the home of FAIL. Google routinely destroys the PR and link marketability of people who sell or buy links. That’s why SEO “flowers” are so dangerous…
What are SEO “Flowers”?
Quick background: Linkwheels are Web 2.0 pages/blogs that are built specifically to pump up the Page rank of and pump link juice to a target site. Think of it as an amplifier for SEO. There’s many “Get 10000000000 hits per day” huckster ebooks and sales pages pushing this concept. However, it’s very easy to do and anyone with some time on their hands for page building, content copywriting, and mapping can build these. The typical structure is SITE A links to SITE B and Target site, SITE B links to SITE C and target site, etc. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this typical link map looks like a FLOWER. Indeed, that’s how it looks on a link mapping application. Something like this:
While flowers are great for enhancing the ambiance of most rooms or as gifts for the object of your affection, they are DEADLY in the SEO realm. Easy to track (and easy to ban) link structures give the kiss of death to any SEO strategy. Make sure you DIVERSIFY your linking structure. There mustn’t be any readily discernible pattern in your link map or else your network and your target site might look like a daisy that got crushed under Google’s boot heel. Not a pleasant sight.
Photo credits: law_keven
Nice post – I am really liking the analogy of the flower!
I have read a great deal about ‘Angela’s link building’ method recently and I think it has already outlived its usefulness.
Your blog raises another good point.
Using grey hat link building methods like article spinning might be very effective at the moment, but once Google works out how to detect these links, you’re in trouble.
With that in mind, we all need to make sure we are building on links on a white hat foundation and only using grey hat for an added boost when needed!
That way we’ll all avoid the crushing of the daisy
Anthony
A better word to describe your linkwheel structure should be dynamic. By dynamic we mean, the web 2.0 properties you chose are intertwined and linked to your main page. To start, Create six unique articles containing the most relevant keyword phrase that you want to focus on in each article. Then to each article, add two or three links (use keyword phrase as anchor text), one pointing to your hub page and the two others to a similar article in one of your spokes, which is a Web 2.0 property. Do the same to all the six spokes.
After creating your link wheel, don’t stop, instead, promote! Make your link wheel popular through back links from social book marking sites or capture the RSS feed in the Web 2.0 properties and submit the feeds to various directories. Don’t forget to ping the RSS feeds whenever new contents are posted. All these activities will help search engines find your site easily.