There are a lot of different linking structures which you can use to create links to your money site, or in other words your main site which you want to rank. At the same time you don’t want to create too many links which are just pointing to your site without strengthening those links themselves.

What is the Best Link Structure

Let’s talk about what is the best link structure right now by identifying a few of the more popular link structures preached by marketers these days.

Link Wheel

The link wheel works to not only create links from social web 2.0 properties to your site, but it works to strengthen those 2.0 sites by interlinking them with each other with the idea that this will in fact strengthen the chain and benefit all of the sites in the chain. The link juice is spread around equally and is meant to continue to grow in this example while pulling from multiple sites.

Check out this post on what is a link wheel for more information.

Link Chain

The link chain looks exactly like the link wheel in that it involves links which link to one another in addition to your site. The difference is that whereas every 2.0 site connects to another web 2.0 site in the wheel, one of the 2.0 sites in the chain does not make that final connection, so the circle is incomplete. So marketers think that leaving the chain unconnected looks more natural to the search engines and what you are trying to do less traceable, leaving a small footprint.

Link Pyramid

The link pyramid is one of the more popular link structures as of late. Whereas the wheel and columns focus on creating an all connected chain of links on various sites which all point to your site, the link pyramid works on multiple linking tiers/levels and doesn’t interconnect links on the same tier. It points your level 2 links to your money site and uses level 3 links to strengthen those level 2 links. Note that the level 3 links have no direct linking contact with the money site. You can use lower quality links on level 3 to strengthen the level 2 links which in theory and in turn strengthens the ranking power of your money site while you’re using your keyword as anchor text whenever possible.

Check out this post on what is a link pyramid for more information.

Ultimately there is no one accepted perfect link structure. SEOers continue to theorize about which link structure looks the most natural and spreads the most link juice, and while it’s very subjective, the point should again be made that the key should be organic and natural looking links above all else while leaving as small a footprint as possible.

I’ll talk more about link structures and show how they tie in in my next post on how to rank a new domain.