Four reasons to build RSS link wheels

Some things have been written about the loss of effectiveness of link wheels, and many people might suspect that link wheels no longer work very well for building back links and ultimately driving traffic to destination websites. I don’t think so First of all, think about the fact that search engines probably don’t want to discriminate against links that come from very popular social networking sites, microblogs, and other types of Web 2.0 websites.

Because? Well, these are sites that are known to be frequently visited and indexed by search engines, not only for the fantastic amount of new content they provide, but also for the fact that they are great resources for extracting member and visitor profile data. This is what search engines are supposedly looking for these days, so don’t dismiss the humble link wheel just yet from this perspective.

I also suspect that not many people take advantage of link wheels, as there is a certain amount of work involved in getting them up and running. So, if you’re smart, you might want to consider spending some time trying out this link building technique before you dismiss it as old stuff. Here are four reasons why I think linkwheels links still make sense.

1. Recent updates to the way search engines work allow new Web 2.0-like property links to be indexed in minutes instead of days.

2. Currently, search engines focus on social networks as part of their metric to collect information from user profiles.

3. Almost all microblogging sites and social networking sites are free to join, free to use, and easy to implement.

4. You can take advantage of many backlinks from social networks and web 2.0 sites that are already frequently favored and indexed by search engines.

I’ve had great success creating link wheels that only involve 5-6 microblogs in a wheel and are automatically updated with RSS feeds. I haven’t really seen anything else written online about this technique and have searched for information periodically over the last year or so. There have been a few forum posts I’ve seen with similar ideas, but nothing specifically that uses RSS feeds to connect micro-blogs and social networking sites in a link wheel.

Over the same period of time, I’ve been testing and tweaking this method using different free tools I’ve researched. I ended up calling this type of RSS feed powered link wheel the “RSS Sage Linkwheel”, or simply the LinkWheel Sage™. I’ve also written a step-by-step guide on how to put these simple link wheels into action.

The guide details my approach to selecting a few free micro-blogging sites and then using embedded RSS feeds as a way to link to these websites to create an automated link wheel.