SEO & Webrings: Reinventing the ‘Link Wheel’?

The Internet as we know it changes rapidly. The web even gets more social and the users are more in control then they used to be.

Therefore, I’ve decided to write a non scientific article about an older phenomenon of the web. It was quite a popular website element back in the days when the only choice you had was browsing with Netscape or Internet Explorer, next to a dialup or ISDN connection: webrings.

Start your wayback machine!

What is a Webring?

First off for the less experienced Internet users (read: young folks), a webring was basically a group of websites linked together in a circular structure, all about a certain topic or theme. Webrings were widespread mostly among amateur websites, and were quite popular in the 1990s and early 2000s.

To be a part of a webring, each site had a common navigation bar; it contained links to the previous and next website. By clicking next (or previous) repeatedly, you would eventually reach the site you’d started at; this is the origin of the term webring. Most of the time a “random” button led to a random website in the webring (“I’m feeling lucky” anyone?).

Although webrings had moderators (your website had to be approved by the moderator), the click-through rate would presumably drop if one of the websites within the ring were broken, unavailable, or offline.

A webring absolutely added extra value for a visitor. I remember when I started surfing the Web (around 1998) I used webrings a lot. Back then it was my source for new Commodore Amiga and (starting) Console Emulator scene websites.

Without webrings, I would have never known these websites existed. Of course, the main reason was the absence of good search engines.

Webrings & SEO

Websites usually joined a webring in order to receive more traffic from related sites. Back in those days, webrings could be considered a search engine optimization technique. And it probably was since search engines had quite different ranking factors back then.

If you look at it now with the current ranking factors, webrings seem quite useless for SEO as they would lack authority. Although there is physical linking to other websites, the links show up randomly and the website owner doesn’t control the “next” or “previous” link in the ring.

Of course a webring looks like a “link wheel.” The strength is much lower when webring expanded.

Imagine having 100 websites within a webring; there won’t be any link value passed all the way back to the “original” website. But mostly the randomness and the embedded script/HTML of the link placement takes the value out of webrings for your SEO campaign (though you might find some potential sites to seek links from).