How to Achieve Natural Link building (Part 2)

In Part one we discussed Natural Link building and how to fake it, but it was really more of an in-depth introduction to the concept.

So how can you take matters into your own hands to generate seemingly natural backlinks?

Well, link wheels come to mind here, but a LOT of people aren’t building link wheels properly.

They’re basically creating easily detected 3 or 4-way backlinks that aren’t open-ended enough to be deemed as natural.  That’s why there have been so many reported cases of link wheels getting G-slapped.

EDIT

Link wheels need to be open-ended, non-closed mechanisms that create backlinks that appear natural. (not any more, csmall, closed link wheels have been created by us and still working to this day

To understand how to implement and “fake” natural backlinking, you need to understand how natural backlinking truly works.

• Is it natural for new content to get exactly 10 social bookmarks immediately from the same bookmarking accounts each and every time something is published?
• Is it natural for a social bookmarking account to link to the same set of websites and the content on there all the time?
• Is it natural for websites that strive for authority to only link to themselves?

Those are just some questions that you need to answer for yourself after doing some observations on sites and web entities in your niche/industry.

What’s being done naturally….

When people visit a site if they like the content they might mention it a forum somewhere using a full url naked link and without your desired anchor text.

This “naked link” adds variety to your inbound linking profile since it’s not the same anchor text-ed hyperlinked keyword hammering away at a certain URL.

However, all this “naked link” does is add variety really… and 100 of these freely obtained sincere, editorial-like “votes” probably won’t get you much higher ranked for your keywords.

Interlinking from on-site content to other content is natural if done in relevant situations (topically relevant to subject matter within post).

In my opinion, there’s more value being passed from contextual links on site than from the “related posts” links that most blog posts have at the end of them.  Interlinking or cross-linking is the easiest way to add link juice to a page and strengthen the overall structure of your site.

Emulation of real linking patterns:

1. If a site URL gets some natural bookmarks, it tends to pick up a few more backlinks and ReTweets along the way and then it finally stops getting these backlinks at some point, only to start up again later on, if at all.  But natural social bookmarking isn’t done all at once and then stopping entirely, forever.
2. Sometimes people will social bookmark a Sphinn or a Digg URL, not the destination URL that the Sphinn, digg, StumleUpon etc… are direct linking to.
3. Sometimes the social bookmarking entities and the destination urls will get linked to by the same parties, and sometimes not.

Natural linking isn’t totally random, and does have detectable patterns…

As random as all the behavior noted above might seem, there is still a pattern to it all.  After all, most of the REAL behavior done by humans is done by….humans and humans tend to reveal behavior traits after being watched for a long enough time.

In every group there’s a leader, whom others follow and link to as a resource.  The “leader” could be a person or just a website that sets off a chain of events that gets its own URL bookmarked and spread around like wildfire.

Others will repeat the leader’s message, (syndicating their content via ReTweets or Social bookmarking, or sometimes re-wording it as their own…) to become quasi-leaders/wanna-be leaders)

Other groups of people (forums/RSS readership of popular blogs) will have other members in it and sometimes, the yin turn will pick something up and start the ball rolling again.

THAT is natural behavior, but it doesn’t mean those “au naturale” smattering of Nofollow backlinks are doing your URL any good, rankings-wise.

All this talk about group behavior is starting to sound like a sociology class!

The easiest way to see this for yourself is to investigate a piece of content as if you were investigating the link profile of  your SEO competition which is the practice of reverse engineering where all their backlinks came from (but in this case you would follow the links obtained for a certain piece of content).

The REAL easy way to do this is to find a very popular site that gets lots of social bookmarks, trackbacks and other types of backlinks and watch the chronology of events that unfold in the “day in the life of a newly published piece of content”.

When a hugely popular site has a lot of followers, it’s content will get bookmarked by some of those followers.

• Do those followers have websites?
• Are they linking back the other sites content from their sites?
• Are they hitting the forums to notify other’s of this URL?

I know this is all kind of like classroom material here, but it does pay off so try observing the linking patterns on sites in your niche to see what’s really going on.  You can do that, or just throw up random closed or open-ended link wheels which aren’t natural seeming and see how that goes.