Old Linkwheel, should I remove?

[Adsau]

I just found a 2yr old link wheel that was setup by a SEO co for my site, it has tripod/webs.com/other web 2.0 type sites.. 8 of them. Each web 2.0 site has about 40 links to it and a single link to my site.

Is it always best to get rid of all this stuff? I have login details for all the "web 2.0" sites.  What if I paid a "designer" $5 to get a bunch of videos and images put on each site and then I wrote some text?
They would be useful sites to surfers, I could theme each site.

I see all this about hunting down dubious links.. but the other day I went to one of the black style forums and the same people as years ago are selling packages with PDF/Doc submissions, private blog networks same old stuff. It does work as people keep buying and using and reviewing it.

If my link wheel hurts then what would stop me pointing it at my competitor? I wouldnt but...

Now a site that has a decent link profile, can they get away with a link wheel or two?

[AlanMosley]

I would get rid of it. I would expect that the links pointing at those sites are seen as part of a the same wheel. tiding up the sites will not fix the problem if that is the case.

[Adsau]

They are all just the usual forum post links that go to those webly style pages..

The thing is that I will be left with virtually no links to my site after I remove these 8 pages that link

I have basicly just a nofollow crunchbase link as my only decent link.

I have a similar moztrust score to my competitors right now and just slightly less 27/100 DA.

The links I will pull them out of the pages and yeah I can always put them back in later. It does make sense that there never could be a valuable link coming from tripod...

[AlanMosley]

It that's is the quality of the links, then remove them. At best they are not helping you, at worst they are looking like spam.

I am a programmer by trade and SEO second, I build new sites and my experiences lately is that you can rank quite well without many links or even none. I truly believe only good links are worth having most links either do nothing for you or hurt you.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I would use open Web Explorer to find out the quality of the links coming in. But the time you can do this simply by looking at it is most likely a link farm that you are talking about.

As far as pointing it at your competitors that is an extremely bad idea. I would definitely take the time to build links that are quality to your own website and trying to hurt your competitors. By the way that Google finds out that you have ever done anything like that they will most likely De index you immediately. They are not easy on people in a very done anything like that.

Spend your time working on your on-site and not focusing on hurting competitors. You'll prosper in the future you never know what Googles going to come up with next and they know a lot about what we're doing right now regardless of how much we think they know trustee they really do no more than we think. And they're taking that into consideration more more time passes.

If you find that these links are not high-quality do not have a high domain ranking or domain trust. I would then eliminate them this will help you rank higher. Thank you. Google's eyes when they're penalizing sites.

I hope I've helped you,

Thomas

[Adsau]

I was just making the point of how can google punish sites for things that others can so easily manipulate like pointing spam links their way.

Competitors can be ruthless, they steal your ideas and hurt you in any way they can.

I really don't like SEO advice on some kind of moral grounds, I think many SEO shops are preaching don't do linkwheels don't do this or that while they have their own private blog farms that they have nurtured for years or other tricks.

One of my competitors has 8 separate domains in the top 20, 4 in the first page.. KEYWORDsydney.com.au KEYWORDmelbourne.com.au also tow of the domains are sham blogs... I am an actual software creator and they are resellers of a software package so I am going to try to get some good links but still they will have plenty of realestate on page one.

But my old linkwheel is gone now!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Adam,

Oh yeah, I understand your point. And I do agree with you competitors can be ruthless in fact some people can have no moral center whatsoever.

I was simply bringing to light the fact of what Google actually goes to people that they do catch rather be something that happens very only or more frequently.

I apologize I came across as scolding or trying to tell you that you're doing something wrong. You actually did bring up something that is important for people to understand and I think it's important that anyone practicing search engine optimization should definitely never use the method of pointing bad links at competitors as Google I know that you understand I was not lying at all when I said how harsh Google is when they catch people that do practice illegitimate forms of search engine optimization or black hat methods in order to beat competitors vs beating them fair and square by creating higher quality content sharing it more frequently using all the tools at your disposal to essentially outrank somebody fair and square for the keywords that you want to record and hopefully they want reports well. I did not mean to say that you were doing anything bad.

Please except my apology if it came across as me saying that you were actually practicing those methods as I did not mean it to.

Respectfully,

Thomas