link wheel
Also called: linkwheel, link wheels
A link wheel is a black-hat link building scheme where a set of satellite sites you control all link to one central "money" site (and often to each other in a loop) to inflate its authority. Google treats link wheels as link schemes that violate its spam policies.
A link wheel has three parts: the hub (your money site), the spokes (satellite blogs, Web 2.0 profiles, or throwaway domains you control), and the interlinking that ties them into a ring. In a closed-loop wheel every spoke links to the next spoke and back to the hub, so link equity circulates instead of leaking away. Open-loop variants drop some spoke-to-spoke links to look less patterned.
Why link wheels are a spam signal
Every layer of a wheel maps onto something Google’s spam policies name directly: “partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking,” “using automated programs or services to create links to your site,” and “creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals.” Because you own the entire graph, the footprint (shared hosting, reused templates, matching anchor text, registration data) is exactly what Google’s systems look for. Google’s John Mueller has said link wheels are “essentially link schemes, so they would be against our spam policies.” A wheel that gets caught can pull the hub into a manual action or algorithmic suppression, so the downside is a ranking loss, not just wasted effort.
If you already control a cluster of related sites, the safe version of the same instinct is a topic cluster: a hub page plus supporting pages on one domain, linked because the content genuinely connects. Paid or sponsored placements are allowed too, as long as they carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" so they do not pass ranking credit.
How it affects your traffic
A link wheel puts rankings on borrowed time: one spam-detection pass and the hub can lose its positions, taking the organic traffic with it. The durable path is earned links from real, independent sites, which is what our Link Building service focuses on (digital PR, niche editorial placements, and links that survive spam updates). If you inherited a wheel or a network footprint, we can audit the profile and disavow the risky links before they trigger a penalty.
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