What does Link Wheel mean in SEO?

As most search engines now ignore reciprocal links and link farms many webmasters have looked for other less obvious ways to create inbound links to their website.

The link wheel is one such idea where several similar themed websites get together and create a circle of links. So website A links to website B which links to website C which then links back to website A. Link wheels can contain any number of websites from the three in this example upwards.

The idea is not new and originally existed in the 1990s as 'rings' for banner swapping. So you might have a 'health ring' where health related sites would swap banners and hence links but the focus then was simply to attract more traffic rather than to improve the ranking of the site.

Essentially link wheels attempt to try and fool the search engines by hiding reciprocal links via third party websites and the method has had some success.

However, as with all systems that are not 'genuine' search engine algorithms are already changing to spot these so in the long term spending money on link wheel programmes is not recommended.