I have already had one of my sites penalized by google and I'm afraid not to get my other site penalized as well. I want to make quality backlinks. I have submitted my site to 100s of directories and more than 150 social bookmarking sites. I have also written a lot of articles and submitted them to ezine. I don't have much content on my site so no blogs link to me. The thing is that I don't know what to do next? Maybe squido/hubpages or what do you suggest?
"Natural" in google's eyes is having good content that people will naturally link to. Submitting to directories and bookmarking sites will offer very little, if any benefit- as you have discovered. Concentrate your time on improving your site - not looking for short cuts. Google is relying more and more on manual reviews of sites, so you really need to make your site one of the best in its niche to justify high rankings for competitive keywords.
natural links will have anchor text such as, click here, web site etc. They will also come from non related forums, blogs and virtualy anywhere you can place a link. But Spam is spam
I think that it's easier to explain what an unnatural link is lol... Signatures, footer links, sidebar links, directories, and the like are all likely examples of something a bit unnatural... repetitive links without much variance in location or text should be an indication that the link in question is not as "important" as something within a post, blog entry, article, etc... In content links from blogs that do not offer a lot of outgoing links should likely be a good view of being natural. When I blog, I do not link to a lot of sites, and on the rare occasion that I do, I generally keep it short and sweet without a string of keywords.... many of these links will show up as [SOURCE] or be within an sentence something like "Yesterday I read a thread on Digital Point about what is a natural link". Normally followed by a short description of how the topic was panning out... The same would apply if I went to the Zoo or something... I'd link to the zoo itself, then maybe a pic of the Monkey's or a link to the monkey page on the main zoo site because monkeys are soo cool Topicality should likely play a roll as well. A blog about SEO would seem a bit more natural to have a link to Digital Point, or a Zoo blog pointing to the Zoo. General blogs likely do not count as much, but they are also important...mine is a general blog (not the one listed in my profile) and I've linked to both the Zoo and DP ... naturally.
Well said about content. The OP said, "I don't have much content on my site." That is a problem. Let's back away from focusing on the details about search engine optimization, etc., and just look at our websites from the larger picture. Content is what a website is all about. If we don't present some good, readable, desirable content to the internet reader, why even have a website? Our purpose should be to offer valuable information to the cyberspace world. To paraphrase an old movie line, "If you build it [here, a website with good content], they will come!"
No problem I would like to add that many of the 'unnatural' ways to get links are still not bad. Sig links are actually a good thing, even if they do not count all that much... Thank you for that post... the web should be about content, and content alone. With that, natural linking can and will follow.
Hi... I'm Shinzo... I guess the best thing you should know for now is to search or read about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. It will surely help you get good ideas on what's the best and right thing to do like the right way of blogging or such article submissions.
first of all, anchor text is not "click here", secondly it's not wise to get links from non-related websites...
It's not? what if it's written something like... Click Here Seriously... When I write links in blogs and forums, I'll often put up my views on the matter, or break an article down, then follow that with a link to the main page I was referring too, often with anchor text along the lings of [source], [click here for more information], or [would you like to know more?]. (Source being the most often used by me). Of course, I'll use better keywords when I'm paid, but when I'm doing it on my own, I'll often use random keywords that are not always in true SEO favor of the place I am linking too... I once got a bunch of stuff from Ebay... when I discussed it online I used this line 'I got a bunch of crap from ebay' and I used CRAP as the anchor text rather then the site name... lol... so yeah, CLICK HERE is, or at least most certainly can be anchor text.