What is a natural link?
-
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to better understand what is meant by a natural link and would appreciate any assistance.
Doing some competitor link analysis I've noticed a web developer who has created a directory for all its customers. This is not a directory in the traditional sense of being of use to an end user, but to my untrained eyes, it looks like an internal directory used solely for the purpose of link building. For all I know this might be perfectly good practice in the industry, but as a beginner, I'm attempting to get an understanding of things.
My question is, what precisely is meant by a natural link? If the above scenario is all ok, whereby there are businesses in the same field of work, but ultimately could be in any given location, on a directory, are they natural links? Do these kind of directories that don't service an end user, exist if the common feature between them is say location only, or an seo agency only?
Appreciate I could be completely out of kilter on this, but it seems the benefit on SERPs is pretty significant for something that seems pretty "unnatural" to me?
Any guidance would be appreciated...tom
-
Thank you for your responses.
It seems it's not quite as clear cut as I was hoping!
I think using your definition Tom, they would appear to be far from natural then. Afraid I can't fathom out how the links are being labelled ameliavargo.... I'm still trying to understand how to decipher the data that moz is providing me.
It's interesting because if this is in fact a valid "loophole" to gain links then it seems pretty effective! Looking at my example, this method is generating thousands of links for the individual businesses listed within the internal directory which I'm imagining must do wonders for SERP's.
So is it fair to assume that the reason this does not get picked up by Google is because all of the links are of businesses in the same field of work? I guess what I'm asking in effect is, how does Google go about assessing the integrity of the links?
-
Hi Moz staff,
Can you put your views about this above question?
-
Hi Tom
It's quite oxymoronic isn't it? "Natural" link building is in itself a strange term, while Google advocates that you don't proactively link build, yet it's algorithm still relies so heavily on it.
In the purest sense, if you are ever proactively looking to build or earn links to your site from another Google is unhappy about it. The reality is though that's completely unrealistic (never mind hard to enforce and hypocritical from them).
When people talk about "natural" link building, they are talking about the kind of link building or earning that leaves you to the lowest possible risk from Google. Many people have their different definitions on the topic, but here's mine:
A "natural" link is one that is:
- Editorially earned
- Contextual within the content it is placed in
- Links to your site using a branded term, raw URL or non-commercial anchor text
To explain these further: By "editorially" earned, I mean that you should provide something, be it an article, resource, video or whatever, that warrants being placed and shared on someone else's website. If your content really jumps out and makes me people go "Oh wow, look at this, I want to share it" or "Hey, that's really relevant to my site and my users", then any link you get as credit for that resource is "editorially" earned. What you'll often find is that it usually means that the site's you get links from are relevant and contextual to your own site - eg if you ran a fishing equipment website, you may get links from local angler clubs. You really want to warrant your link being in there by producing something of excellent value.
By "contextual", I mean that your link should appear within the body of the article or written content of the webpage. If you've "editorially earned" your content, this should usually happen - however what has happened in the past, even on Moz, is that authors or publishers would advocate the use of an author biography that contains a link to their site. In my mind, it is far better to have a link surrounded by the content/video/article/etc itself - as in put the link there while you're talking about it - as I feel Google are blanket devaluing author bio boxes (rightly or wrongly depending how you see it). Rather than leave it to chance, I'd rather get the link in the content of the page itself.
And finally, how the site links to you seems to be a big factor in "natural" link building. I think Google (again, rightly or wrongly) always look for an excuse to hold it against you if they find you have links going to your site that contain anchor text that you might want to rank for. It's quite ridiculous, I know, but in order to keep things "natural", I'd say you should only have links that contain your brand, just your URL, or any miscellaneous anchor text (eg "check out what these guys did at the weekend").
So when we talk about "natural" link building that's what I think people mean. Now, is this the way you want to do your SEO? Is it the best way? Is it the most suitable or usable and will it give the greatest return of investment? That's all up for debate. I wouldn't say I'm either for or against this method - and it really does differ depending on your resources and industry. There are plenty of people there doing "unnatural" link building and getting results and ROI. One thing I would say though is that it's hard to build and keep a brand presence if your site is being penalised, so natural link building does come into its fore there.
I hope this helps - as you can see the question makes for a good debate and I hope my point of view helps explain a few things.
-
From what you've described, this web developer is creating unnatural links. However, it depends on how it's done - if the links are clearly labelled as 'Our customers' or 'Sites we've designed' then it's not so bad. These sorts of links should probably be made nofollow to avoid problems.
A natural link is a link that is obtained naturally - as in you didn't ask for it or pay for it. Most links are not natural!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
AllTop Linking Me to Other Sites Feeds, Webmasters Reporting Lots of Broken Links
I submitted my blog to All Top awhile ago and something seems to be wrong with their feed. They're sending people to mysite.com/truth-o-meter.com/this-is-a-post. It's not just truth-o-meter either. I'm getting links that are supposed to go to all kinds of political blogs. As a result, I'm getting a ton of broken links reported on Google Webmasters. I couldn't find any real support option on alltop.com, and when I log in, there are no sites for me to manage. Instead, I resubmitted the site with the correct feed address and in the comments, I mentioned the problem. All I got was a message saying the site was rejected. I believe because I already added the site. But I'm thinking they didn't pay attention to the comments. (In fact the message may have gone through an auto-filter considering how quickly it was rejected.) Is there a way to solve this? Is this a situation in which I would use the disavow tool? If All Top continues to create bad links, how do I stop the issue once and for all? Thanks!
Link Building | | eglove0 -
Internal Links - How to Increase them, Categories not being considered as Internal Links
Hi All: As per my understanding, Internal Equity Passing Links is a metric defining PA. Now my website has around 65 internal links while few of my competitors have more than 180 links. I am unable to understand how to increase the internal links passing equity on my website, because I can see, more number of links on my website than my competitors but opensiteexplorer does not show that. I am really confused. Please help out if anyone knows something about this issue. Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | sidjain4you0 -
33k links from Yahoo?
Google WMT says I have over 33,000 backlinks from Yahoo.net, linking to 4 different pages on my site. I am not sure if these are nofollow or not, but I would assume they are. It also says I have almost 4,000 links from feedblitz. Should I be concerned or do something about either of these two things? I am pretty unfamiliar with RSS feeds.
Link Building | | redfishking0 -
How To Increase Back Links
Our web store, www.audiobooksonline.com has good PageRank (6) compared to some competitors for the keywords audiobook, audiobooks, audio book, audio books. One big difference is that most top ranking competitors have significantly more back links including from .gov and .edu sites. Our domain URL has been on the Web since 1997 so naturally occurring back links likely has run its course. What is the best way to get more back links? Best tool to get back links with?
Link Building | | lbohen0 -
Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?
We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.
Link Building | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Link Building - Natural - My site is the best to rank #1
Hi, I like to ask the mozers. Write here, the link building methods, the most natural way, with 0% spam. Tell us, i make an example, on a small competition on the internet, i see competitors with 100 - 120 backlinks from root domains. Tell us, the best tips, to use and to build 50 - 80 backlinks for a month, on the most natural way, nothing is too much, so write here, demonstrate!
Link Building | | leadsprofi0 -
Natural Link Profile - Ranking Signal?
Hi, Is a natural link profile a ranking signal? What is the value in a natural link profile? What is a (natural?) link graph? Is Majestic SEO the only company capable of visualizing a link graph? (I know the answers to these questions but I want to hear what SEOMoz has to say in the quasi-official standards of SEOMoz Q/A) Regards,
Link Building | | qlkasdjfw0