Link Trio: My Review of Glen Allsop’s Backlinking Strategy

If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend checking out Glen Allsop’s (author of ViperChill) new post on what he likes to call a “Link Trio“.

What is the Link Trio? Think of it as a link wheel but without reciprocating links. I have been using link wheels for a while now and have had tons of success with them. I felt Glen did a pretty good job explaining it and how it works but I felt his picture could have been a little clearer in showing what it is. I felt that the overlapping arrows made it a little confusing. I took the liberty in recreating his diagram for clarity as you can see below.

As you can see, it is an alteration of a link wheel using high authority sites as its spokes.

What is a Link Wheel?

To understand what a link wheel is, we need to understand what a link is and how “link juice” flows. Every webpage on the internet has some level of authority. A brand new site will have virtually no authority (though it does have a little) while a site like Wikipedia will have tons of authority. Authority is determined by a lot of things such as age of the site, amount of content, links pointing to the domain, domain extension, etc.

This authority can be thought of as “link juice”. Think of each webpage being a cup with some water in it. Let us say that a completely full cup represents Wikipedia and a cup with a few drops of water it is a brand new page on a brand new site. If we have a link from one of those sites to our website, then we can think of it as tipping both glasses into our site’s glass. The Wikipedia glass will pour a ton of its link juice into our cup while the link from the brand new site will put virtually no water into our cup. Now that our site has been filled up a little by Wikipedia, WE now have quite a bit of link juice (page authority).

Now that you are thirsty but have a better idea of what links are, let’s talk about what a link wheel is! A link wheel looks like the diagram above where high authority sites are used to link to our sites. These high authority sites are our “spokes” on our link wheel (think of a bicycle wheel). Looking at the diagram above, if we just had the Ezine article pointing to our site, then that would have been one transfer of link juice to our site. It is a good start…. but we can do better!

We also point the Ezine article to our Go Article. The Go Article then points to our site and then again to our Squidoo lens. As you can see, each spoke transfers link juice to our site AND transfers some of its juice to our other spokes. What this does is compound our link juice throughout our network and then focuses it back into our site supercharging our sites link juice and authority! Smart, huh?

So Why Don’t We Reciprocate the Links on Each Site?

If our website had a link to our Ezine article and our Ezine article pointed a link back to our website, this would be called a reciprocating link. Google devalues these links because if they didn’t, there would be an infinite loop of link juice transferring. Google thinks of authority as a lot of sites talking about one specific site, not all the sites talking about each other.

What this means for us is that we need to “trick” Google’s algorithm to get the same link juices flowing. In Glen’s Link Trio, he has all the webpages pointing to two other webpages, but none of those webpages is pointing back to a webpage that is pointing to it. That might sound a little confusing but look at the diagram. None of the sites point to each other. It is jut a one way street with every link.

Link Wheels and Link Trios Are Awesome! Tell Me More!

Yes, they are awesome and it DOES really help rankings. What it doesn’t do is provide an easy solution for ranking things. Google does not like that we are capable of tricking their algorithm into having non-reciprocating link wheels. Google is now able to recognize simple patterns of link wheels and link trios and they devalue them a little. When link wheels first started, they were really ranking sites well, but since Google has cracked down on them a bit, they aren’t nearly as effective.

To keep a lot of the effectiveness, you will have to create a linking structure that is hard to detect (has less symmetry and less of a pattern). You are going to want to have link wheels that don’t fully close or loop. You will want some spokes getting five inbound links while some getting only one or zero. Make it as unique and non-symmetrical as possible for the best results.

What Sites Should I Use For My Link Wheel or Link Trio?

The short answer is we want to use a mix of different Web 2.0 sites and high authority sites. If you look at Pat Flynn’s great post on his backlinking strategy, you can see he uses a Link Wheel himself. He uses blogs, article directories, Web 2.0 sites and another technique which gives him tons of backlinks to his spokes. Mass produced links pointing to link wheel and link trio spokes turbo charge the link juice that is circulated. I personally prefer ScrapeBox but to each their own. Any of those options will work.

I was going to post a bunch of Web 2.0 sites to use for your link trio but I found a solid list of sites here. Just be sure to see if the outbound links are dofollow on these Web 2.0 sites and you should be good!

I’m curious to see: who else has had a good or bad experience with link wheels and link trios in the past? Please post any experiences, thoughts, or ideas in the comments below!

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