Google can distinguish between off-page SEO & natural linking.

They're finally cracking down on websites that actively acquire links - paid, traded, exchanged, posted. Off-page SEO is the most effective aspect of SEO and single greatest manipulation of search engines. If you don't have a natural linking profile, your links could soon become as worthless as article marketing.

How to stay under the radar:

Ask yourself what would occur in the natural linking world.

1. Acquire links at a rate proportional to your traffic - think conversion rate.

A certain percentage of your visitors are webmasters, bloggers & forum/comment posters. A certain percentage of those will find your website relevant. Finally, a certain percentage of the remainder will actually link to you. Try to figure out what that final percentage is & multiply that by your monthly traffic. The product will be how many links you should acquire monthly. If you really want to get fancy, you can figure the ratio of websites vs blogs vs posts that should be linking to you. You can go one step further estimate how many related PR(n) sites actually exist and acquire links according to their "population distribution".

2. Vary your anchor text

Not all naturally occurring links are going to include your target keywords in the anchor text. Ideally they would, but most likely, there will be some variation, hopefully semantically related.

3. Target semantically related sites

Links from unrelated sites aren't going to be of much value. Authority is granted to websites according to their areas of expertise, so a vote from an unrelated website is like a vote for a public office for which you weren't even running.

4. Use exposed urls occasionally

Honestly, are all backlinks going to be href format with neatly optimized anchor text? No. Links from public postings are much more likely to be naked urls. And if your site is worth talking about, people will be mentioning the url in public access sites (blog comments, forums, etc)

5. Consider mixing in some no-follow

Google knows that you know that they only consider do-follow. Wouldn't a site with all do-follow links say "off-page SEO right here." Including no-follow where no-follow is common might push your do-follow value up. When requesting links from other sites, if they are reluctant to link to your low PR site, offer them the option of no-follow.

6. Avoid reciprocal linking, 3-way linking, self-interlinking & linking communities

Google's "Florida Update" took care of this. If you engage these practices, it is a sure sign of an attempted manipulation and you will be demoted for it.

7. Avoid footer, "partners", "sponsors" & "links page" links

Google knows that these links are links for the sake of linking. No value.

8. Social Bookmarking rate proportional to traffic

Somewhat difficult to control, but if people are bookmarking your site using social bookmarking tools, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo Bookmarks, etc... that tells the SE's your site is important. Make bookmarking easy by providing a "share this" or "add this" link on your site. sharethis.com & addthis.com

Feel free to comment, object or suggest more ideas.

I'm not suggesting that Google is going to wipe sites with unnatural profiles off the map. While against their webmaster guidelines, they recognize that if someone went through the trouble of all that linking, it's probably a quality site. They also recognize that while webmasters can go out and actively acquire links, they have no control over who is voluntarily linking to them. I doubt someone would go out of their way to give a competitor's site an unnatural linking profile, but it is a vulnerability to the "natural link profile" logic. What I am saying that Google is going to reward "naturalness." And to your benefit, natural linking simulation is more conservative, more efficient and less costly than standard off-page SEO.

New & historically low-traffic sites will be under closer scrutiny with regard to unnatural linking. I do not believe popular, high-traffic, older sites will be affected as much. Google will probably just apply a damping factor to account for anomalous linking.

 

I haven't heard of this yet. where did you get this information from. definately something to think about.

 

Great tips. Thanks for sharing!

 

Good post. Google has been giving websites penalties for overusing the same link anchor text. So I definitely agree that they are watching out for unnatural link profiles. Too many quality websites have an unnatural link profile though. So I agree that older, high traffic websites can probably get away with more.

I don't really agree with your formula for determining how many links you should get. By following any kind of preset formula, you are making your link profile look unnatural. A natural link profile may have only a few links one day and several dozen the next day. It is not going to be consistently building on a nice steady curve. There will be fluctuations.

I also don't agree with your suggestion about social bookmarking. I think some niches would get very few social bookmarks. I don't think search engines would bother differentiating between a social bookmarking website and some other website.

 

Really good post.

Keep it related.

 

This is an excellent post and very informative.

No.7 is always a concern but I cannot say that I entirely agree with this point. Having worked in online travel and and seeing the way many travel groups operate their sites - it would appear to be quite favourable!

Well done on taking out the time to write this.

 

Using in-context links is also good. 3-way linking will probably always work provided you do it well, i.e., leave no footprints.

 

Great post, very informative

I do have one little Bone to pick...

Are you seriously saying that Article Marketing is worthless?... If so, you must be doing it wrong

I make a great deal of my online revenue from Article marketing, in fact, I have one particular article on Ezinearticles.com that has had over 97,000 views in less than 2 years and has earned me over $21,000.00 cash, That's only one of my articles.

Just had to get that off my chest... Article marketing is by no means worthless when you know how to do it correctly

 

DMI, good comment: where did you get this info? Has Google leaked some info. Sure, it would be the next step for Google to get more natural search results, but are you sure they are going to (or can for that matter) check for all these aspects.

 

Not really. I was just poking fun at SEO's who submit thousands of re-purposed articles to build backlinks.

 

All kinds of SEO will die soon, it's a matter of time..
Get ready for Search 2.0.

Think about it, if 3 of your friends had already marked a site as bad, would you still check that result? The new internet is all about collaboration, recommendation and sharing, search engines won't be an exception. So I'd spend my time on innovation rather than worrying about SEO.

 

Yes, I would agree. Not that you'd be able to consistently achieve a targeted number of links, but a natural profile would have historical fluctuations. However, there is a correlation between traffic and links. Fortunately, you can take control of your traffic with paid advertising, thus allowing you to ramp up your link-building rate. Going after high-traffic pages would also help speed up the process.

 

Great post, although I still believe the more links and higher PR the better!

Regards,
GD

 

#1 is a fallacy...I've gotten over 1,000 links for a day old website and ranked it in the top 5 for a semi-competitive term (1 million+ results) within 24 hours. Also, some new sites that engage in viral marketing can pull in 100,000+ links in 3 months and rank on the first page for very competitive terms....an example is mingle2.com.

 

Unless you have Google Analytics installed, Google would not know how much traffic your website receives. So I don't base my link building on my traffic levels at all. It doesn't make sense to assume that since a website gets x number of visitors that website should get y number of links. Certain websites wouldn't get many natural links despite how much traffic they get. I prefer to just build links at a gradually increasing rate. Just don't go crazy and get a ton of links at the beginning of a link building campaign.

 

I'd give Semantic Search about 10 years to develop; then SEOs can really start to worry.

There's already plenty of behavioral data for Google to analyze: Click-Through, Bounce Rate, Visit Duration, Bookmarking, URL in browser (Google Chrome), Google WikiSearch.

Natural linking simulation, behavioral optimization and semantic relation are likely to be the next big 3 SEO categories. And I think SEOs will be up for the challenge.

 

Thanks for sharing your SEO thoughts with us. My only concern on it is that some of the concepts (#1 and #7) seem like are not backed up with proof in real life.

I've also seen people making money with article marketing and getting lots of exposure and good rankings thanks to their linking efforts.

It may be true that google may have a way to measure odd linking but so far, who knows their real criteria on this and to what extent they consider the web pages to be linked on an odd manner?

Still a mystery to me and I think to many others.

 

SEO guy, how did you get 1000 links within 24 hours? WOW!

 

What works today will not work tomorrow. But if it works now, great!

Your post indicates that Google has a higher linking allowance for old websites. It's the simplified assumption that an old site has had more time to acquire links so they must be valid. My concern is that as SE's advance, they will examine your historical linking trends more closely.

Then there's the aspect of Google's finite resources. How much data can they actually gather & analyze? I suppose they would target the lowest hanging fruit first before adding 500 new elements to the algo.

 

Who's they and a reliable URL to that statement, please.