What Is Tiered Linking and How Does It Work

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If you've been in the SEO world for a while, then more than likely you've heard about terms such as Tiered Linking, Link Pyramids, Link Diagrams, Link Wheels, or even branded services that take care of the creation of such structures such as LinkPushing.

So what is Tiered Linking, anyway?

Tiered Linking is a strategy where multiple tiers are created around the money site, placing the most valuable properties at the very top (high quality properties), then the less valuable properties (medium quality), then at the lower tier the least valuable links are located.

Let me demonstrate this by a simple diagram.



At the very top, a small number of properties is created (web 2.0 properties, article pages, etc.), linking directly to your money site or page. These properties are usually of the highest quality, meaning each of these properties has a unique design, articles, and sometimes pictures or videos specially created for each property. These properties usually hold higher authority, looking very clean and non-spammy.

At the second tier, the medium quality links are located. Also, the number of properties at that level is usually higher than the number of properties used at the first tier (top tier). These properties are usually of a lower quality, usually from lower PR sites (web 2.0's, article pages, and so forth). The second tier links directly to the first tier.

At the third tier, this is usually where the least valuable links reside. These links could be xrumer profile links or posts/scrapebox blasts, article blasts, and so on. These links should be linking directly to the second tier properties, with various anchor texts.

Now let's demonstrate that with numbers (these numbers are just for demonstration).

At the first tier, you create 3 web 2.0 properties, made of a few unique articles, a video and some pictures, all of the properties link directly to your money site (or page).

At the second tier, you create two properties linking directly to each of the first tier properties. These properties are of medium quality.

At the third tier, you add all links that you can get, linking directly to second tier properties. E.g: Xrumer/SB blasts.

Then you end up with something like this:



So why do people use such structures and not link directly to their sites?

The concept here is to only have authority pages linking directly to the money site, keeping the less important or valuable links at the bottom of the structure. Each and every tier passes authority/link juice to the tier it's linking to (or above it), till all of the juice is passed to the money site (or page).

What is a Link Wheel?

A link wheel is basically a number of web 2.0 properties linking to each others, in some way, while linking to the main money site. The concept of a link wheel is passing authority/link juice to each structure one after another, then passing all of that juice at the end to the money site.

A basic link wheel looks like this:



If you look at the above figure for a minute, you'll notice that the footprint for that link wheel can be easily spotted, by humans and search engines as well. Search engines started devaluing such linking schemes from a while now, as more and more search engine optimizers started using the technique. So to overcome that, SEO guys started creating more sophisticated linking structures.

These structures were basically more advanced link wheels, that hide the footprints from search engines by linking randomly to each others, making it harder for search engines to spot the footprints. These are usually called Random Link Wheels.


A Random-Linking Link Wheel looks like this:



Yes, you've guessed that right. This is by far the most advanced linking structure that exists today. The number of properties used in such a link diagram depends on the niche that you're involved in, the strength of the competition, and so forth.

How to create such linking structures?

There are a lot of different tools out there that take care of creating web 2.0 properties, bookmarks, article submission and so forth. Just to name a few, there is SeNuke, xGen SEO, Sick Submitter, Article Marketing Robot and Bookmark Demon.

I've personally used some of these softwares, some of them do what they promise, while some don't. But if you're just getting started with all of this stuff, then I'd recommend that you start out by doing them by hand, taking advantage of an iMacros script and an auto-form filler - This is really the simplest (and cost-effective) way to do it. I'm not really a fan of buying stuff that you don't REALLY need or don't know much about. When you're really sure that you need this or that tool, then you buy it.

I hope this tutorial gave you an idea about how these stuff work, hopefully I didn't leave anything out. If you have any questions, feel free to post them over here.


To your success,
Griffon