The Natural Rule of Link Building

Natural Links Win

With regards to link building, I am going to misquote an old sports saying, “[natural] versus nurture, [natural] always wins”. In our last link building blog All Juiced Up, we discussed the importance of obtaining quality links, and how to use its juice most effectively.

Consider inbound links in their most natural form; if you have a meaningful site, how will the majority of your natural links be derived, and what will they look like? They will come in from various channels (blogs, forums, resource directories) and use a variety of anchor text, deeplinks, and supporting text. Let’s us use a vacation rental website as an example, some natural links may look like:

1. “I recommend staying at one of these vacation rentals when visiting Laguna Beach”. * anchor text, homepage link, and supporting text
2. “There are some great attractions in Laguna Beach.” *anchor text, deep link, supporting text
3. “I checked out some guest reviews and found this companies vacation rentals to be well ranked: www.invoguelagunabeach.com/Booking/AvailableRooms.aspx.” *no anchor text, deep link to rental search page, supporting text

The variations are endless, but the point remains that high volume link deviation appears natural to the search engines. Make sure you consider this when constructing your overall SEO strategy.

What’s Not Natural?

Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving, and there are always large scale attempts to beat these coveted codes through unaccepted mean, typically considered Black Hat SEO. With Regards to link building, Google Bombing is the most recognized method and was made famous in 2007. The Democratic party is a social media powerhouse, and controls a vast network of authoritative online channels. Collectively, a portion of them linked the anchor text “Miserable Failure” to George Bush’s Whitehouse homepage, yielding his site as that the top result.

Google later changed its algorithms to correct the issue, and to identify and discount unnatural links (such as mass general directory submissions). Keep these 3 rules in mind when link building

1. Vary Anchor Text – Stay focused, but deviate your anchor text every few links, and in some cases just use a direct link to your website i.e. www.yoursite.com. *Make sure your anchor text selection is a larger consideration of your overall SEO strategy and keyword selection
2. Use Deep Links – remember most of the valuable information on your website is NOT on your homepage. Link to the pages that matter.
3. Work with sites of Topical Relevance – Chances are, a site completely unrelated to yours would never naturally link to you. So work with site of relevant content, it will be more meaningful to both parties.

Posted by Sam Marks on 5/21/2009 0 Comments