How to Achieve Natural Link building (Part 2)

February 9, 2010 by Daniel McGonagle
Filed under: Link building Tips 

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.

Link wheels need to be open-ended, non-closed mechanisms that create backlinks that appear natural.  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.

 

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Comments

10 Comments on How to Achieve Natural Link building (Part 2)

  1. Rushikesh Kamreja on Sat, 20th Feb 2010 3:44 am

    2. Hi, nice read, i am looking forward for your more detailed Link Dozer review.

    Regards,
    Rushikesh Kamreja

  2. Luca on Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 11:12 am

    3. Well I’ve never seen so much nofollow linking on any site before – Ever. In my browser nearly every single link on your site is bold pink. I mean nearly everything, including blog post links on the home page. I’ve heard of link juice funnelingto a particular page but wow. The only non-no-follow links I can see are the Page links on the far right and the link building services bottom left. Just thought I’d let you know in case it wasn’t what you were aiming for.

  3. Luca on Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 11:14 am

    4. But I have to say the actual content is fabulous. Beats testing all on my own and not many people are posting syndication service test results.

    Cheers.

  4. Daniel McGonagle on Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 11:30 am

    5. Luca, thanks for noticing and kudos for the analysis of the on-page SEO.

    I am using Yoast’s Robots meta plugin for follow attributes “allocation” and it was all good but then I reactivated the Virtual Silo plugin which does something similar but has some extras, too. There may be an issue with one overriding the other. I’m not too worried about it since my new custom Thesis theme will have everything I want for attributes allocation and PR funnelling built into it.

    I also use a free plugin called Cross Linker which hyperlinks EVERY single word I dedicate a link to, and this makes for a lot of affiliate links getting hyperlinked so there was more benefit to be gained by decreasing the outbound link juice and NoFollowing all those aff links than there was from DoFollowing all post links.

    There’s minimal link juice passed on a site internally from blog post to blog post and while I think that’s important there’s still more SEO value to the iste such as it is, to merely NoFollow on a global navigation level.

    Hope that makes sense… MY goal with Virtual Silo plugin was really just to make sure each and every url got connected to the others, but not by using Related Posts since related posts plugins don’t guarantee a connecting link to next post, next category etc… Since this is one of myheavier-trafficked blogs I do some of my testing here. The Virtual Silo plugin got some of my oldest posts re-indexed and ranked better by using “breadcrumb-style” links (to next posts).

  5. Daniel McGonagle on Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 11:33 am

    6. Luca, thanks again for the feedback. It’s a labour of love and I DO “waste” a lot of money on junk services but some people say, “a links a link” right so in the long run, the readers of this blog get some real testing done for them by me, and I get to some sort of benefit from the testing, too but its just not always worth my time invested for using those services.

    After a while you start to see the common failings for a lot of services before you even start using them.

  6. Luca on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 10:33 am

    7. Hey Daniel

    I see a lot less nofollow on the site today :) About 60% less :)

    Internal linking isn’t something a lot of us are bothered with in IM, because we’re “snipers” – you know we think in terms of narrow keyword choices. 3 or 4 max. Some people target just one.

    In that situation, internal linking ain’t going to get you far against someone’s external links.

    You probably already know this, but where I’ve seen it really matter is ecommerce stores – there you have the wide semantic net approach that IM marketers don’t have time for.

    You know as I think about it here, internal linking is a MONSTER powerful strategy for someone with one a large online store. Products have so many long tail variations that just passing internal link juice around exposes a site to 100s more keywords.

    Anyway, thanks again for your site.

    Luke – My name’s actually Luke. Not quite sure why I posted as Luca – the Southern European version. My wife’s from there. Perhaps I thought my nofollow comments might offend… Glad they didn’t.

  7. Daniel McGonagle on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 10:36 am

    8. Hey, yeah LUKE… :) Very offensive to me when someone lets me know my site’s messed up grr… Just kidding, it’s really appreciated. I deactivated the Virtual Silo plugin so hopefully all’s good now, will check later.

    And yes the bigger the sites, the more instances you get where the internal links can pile up making for a nice SEO benefit.

  8. Luke on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 10:39 am

    9. Ak, changed the saved name field now.

    Actually after I posted I looked at the seoquake toolbar and you have 136 pages indexed. That really is quite a lot of pages of content.

    I can see why you worked on internal linking; it would definitely be worth you while with that many pages.

    I’m suprised the related comments plugin can’t be thoroughly relied upon for linking to everything. But I do remember now that Thesis will allow you to create multiple (and not nessarily visible in sidebar) categories that effectively group pages.

    Then you can use one of their hook thingies (or is a procedure? can’t remember) to display links to all posts in the category – which you could choose to add to all posts in that category. Basically a better managed version of related posts.

  9. Luke on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 10:44 am

    10. Ha ha. :)

  10. Daniel McGonagle on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 2:03 pm

    11. Exactly…. Everyone says Thesis is a good theme for SEO but nobody can explain why, but little by little I see all its benefits, and some ways to improve on what it already does. You noticed how many pages I have indexed, I’ve published 126 posts and have 4-5 pages so it looks like the interlinking is working and everything’s been spidered well enough to be indexed

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