Link Wheel vs Link Pyramid...

Hi,
There was a discussion some time ago here: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...k-pyramid.html
Some say you can get penaltized for a wheel, but I don't believe it. The majority (of those who gave their opinion) agrees that pyramid is more effective.
I'd also vote for pyramid - it is simpler and more stable, IMO. But only the experiment could tell for sure.

From my experience Link Pyramids are more effective. But the best thing to do is mix it up. Build Pyramids. Build Web 2.0s. Build link wheels.

Using any one method exclusively can make your site look suspicious. Especially new sites. So take advantage of all the tools you have at your disposal. This will give you the best result.

I have heard a lot of people mention that they manual build several quality web 2.0's and then "blast" these site with thousands of lower quality links using scrapebox and xrummer. Does any one still do this with any success?

It depends on what properties you are using. A link pyramid isn't good if one of your properties could get deleted.

For instance lets say you have a blog post which is linking to your money site, then 200 web 2.0s are linking to that blog post, and 100 forum profiles linking to each web 2.0. If your blog post happens to get deleted or severely devalued, then all of a sudden you not only lost the power of that blog post but all of the other links in the pyramid!

So a pyramid is only strong if the higher tiers are on high quality stable sites.

A link wheel can be effective since their can be a "carry over" effect. 1 links to 2 which links to 3 which links to 4 which links to 5. So the links from 1 help 2, which helps 3, which helps 4, which helps 5, which helps 1, which then makes the links from 1 that were helping 2 are more effective, etc. But that can have the same problem as the pyramid. If one of those linked sites is deleted or penalized then suddenly the entire wheel is hurt. Plus this makes it even easier for Google to footprint since it can just go through the pyramid to find all the sites (a big wheel like that would never happen naturally, which makes it easier for Google to footprint).

But even a link pyramid is starting to lose its effectiveness. In order to get around Google's algorithms you need to have randomized link structures so Google can't start seeing patterns.

Instead of the above example I gave, I'd much rather have 1 blog post with 40 2.0s pointing at that blog post, and another 40 2.0s pointing to the first set of 2.0s and the other 120 2.0s pointing to the money site with 200 forum profiles links going to each of those properties. It's a lot more random, chaotic, and harder for Google to footprint.

I agree with you cardine , the more diversified is your backlink profile, the more effective will be the strategy.

Completely agree with your opinion, diversifying the backlink structure is the key for sure.