What Constitutes a Natural Link Profile?

When building links SEOs often take into consideration metrics that Google and other search engines might use to determine if a site is actively trying to manipulate their results. Avoiding detection, or creating a natural link profile is commonly overlooked in the SEO business. In truth the metrics SEO’s use are often arbitrary and rely on ‘best guess’ approaches. It’s difficult to know for sure whether Google tries to detect manipulation algorithmically or what metrics it might employ, however one can put on their Google hat and make an educated guess as to what might be reasonable yardsticks to measure by.

Link Building Basics

Vary Your Anchor Text

While pursuing links from all of the above site’s is a worthwhile endeavor, no amount of artificially trying to appear natural makes much sense if you put a giant bullseye on your back by building links that all have the same anchor text. Varying up your anchor text on links you build, buy or rent is the safest way to go.

Vary Blog/Forum Platforms

Sure you may have found the latest and greatest way to slip nofollow free links past wordpress or drupal, but exclusively building links on one or two platforms looks a little suspicious wouldn’t you say? Just because a link isn’t passing linkjuice or keyword rankings, don’t automatically assume it’s worthless. Every link has some value, even if its just to diversify your portfolio.

Deep Link Your Site

If your site has 5,000 pages it might raise a red flag if all of your good anchor text rich links point to the homepage. Get around this by creating multiple keyword landing pages and deep link to them with a mix of anchor text.

Solicit Links from 0 PR Pages

Not every link that a site acquires over time comes from a PR 6 page. Typically the vast majority of pages that link to you organically will have 0 PR. Once again if all the pages that link to yours are from high PR pages, a spotlight could shine on your site.

Build Links Over Time

Most of this article has dealt with who to acquire links from and where those links point. A third equally important metric is the time it takes to acquire your links. Most sites don’t go from 0-60 overnight. A good linkbait article CAN do this for your site, however building links over time is the safest way to approach things.

Link Profile Metrics

Existing Tools

Several popular seo tools already list possible metrics. Aaron Wall’s SEO tool for example lists a site’s Whois, Technorati index, Bloglines subscribers and del.icio.us bookmarks as potential metrics. SEO Quake lists only a site’s whois and del.icio.us bookmarks. As del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking tool it makes sense that if Google uses any sites as metrics, del.icio.us bookmarks would be first on the list. However with so many social media networks, if you are investing time and money in building links; spreading your eggs across several baskets is the wise move to avoid detection and possible penalty.

These are some sites that we at Indexed Content feel are good candidates to pursue links from to build a natural link profile for your site:

• Digg.com – a site that has made the front page of digg is likely to receive good backlinks on its own, however sites that don’t have multiple pages submitted are not likely to be worthy of keyword rankings for difficult to rank terms
• Stumbleupon – sites with several reviews by diverse users seem like a good fit to have naturally acquired good backlinks
• Del.icio.us – the first and most popular social bookmarking tool, all del.icio.us links are nofollowed making them of dubious SEO quality which makes them a natural fit as an organic metric
• Google Bookmarks – A bookmarking tool from Google, and since Google has access to all the data, using it as a metric would be exceedingly easy
• Technorati – the prominent blog search, ranking, and notifier of new blog posts, not a natural fit for certain sites that don’t run blogs
• Wikipedia – the worlds largest human edited encyclopedia, Wikipedia is free for anyone to edit but getting links to stick isn’t easy unless your site has expert quality content that qualifies.
• Faves.com (formerly bluedot) – Another popular social bookmarking site that adds nofollows to links.
• Furl – A social bookmarking site
• Blogmarks – A social bookmarking site
• Blinklist – A social bookmarking site
• Yahoo’s MyWeb – A social bookmarking/social media tool from Yahoo! When Yahoo controls the data why wouldn’t they use it as a metric and reward sites that score well on their products?

Although a lot of progress has been made concerning this problem there are people out there, gifted ones of course that use all their skills in developing the latest in “spam industry”. Captcha protection simply doesn’t catch it anymore, neither registrations nor any other basic spam avoiding trick.

Xrumer has reached platinum and for only 450 $ this is an affordable spam machine ! If you haven’t checked it out then check the potential here. I’m not promoting spam software but instead I’m just trying to underline the fact that malicious software exists and is reachable to anyone waving the green papers. Most people tend to study software like this because they can come up with better protection but I guess there will always be “the next big thing” and as long as you catch the wave (as a spammer) and monetize the flaw/exploit/tool (basically being always one step ahead) you’re going home with all the goodies.

Of course those who make a living out of spam know what they’re doing and people will do anything to continue their incomes and why not extravagant lifestyle. So what should a web entrepreneur/ seo person do to get some $?

• Mind your own business and work like a slave (Probably the most common decision people tend to take but very lousy payments ).
• Turn to the dark side and risk it for those extra $$$ (n/a if you don’t have the brains/info/connections/software/equipment but very high payments).
• Speculate opportunities while working your ass off or doing blackhat seems to be the best combo but you need to be informed all the time, have the money to invest and be one hell of a salesperson. But things are not impossible, one recent example being the acquisition of Pizza.com and like QuadsZilla was saying…. well it was sold for too little or practically stolen.

It’s really up to you to choose the color of your hat but there are a few variables that people tend to forget about in any industry. Besides knowledge a person should be able to to think outside the box and adapt as the business evolves… makes sense right?

Digg’s new API is impressive. Incorporating your digg user account activity or your domain’s popular posts into your blog or using it as part of a micro blogging strategy is a snap. The easiest way I have found is to use Nick Halstead’s Simple Digg API Usage script. This script doesn’t require PEAR and it works on PHP 4 & 5.

Digg User Lookup

The Basics

To get started, you need to create (as in ‘out of thin air’) an application key and a user agent. There is no application key signup like Google or Youtube, however the application key you choose should meet the following requirements:

from the digg api wiki
The value of the appkey argument must be a valid absolute URI (see IETF RFC 2396) that identifies the application making the request. The URI might point to:

• The application itself, if it’s a web application.
• A web page describing the application.
• A web page offering the application for download.
• The author’s web site.

Html

The html for the form to display to request digg user name.

<form action="" method="post">
<table border="0">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2">User Lookup</td>
    </tr>
  </thead>
<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>User Name</td>
    <td>
  <input maxlength="50" name="uid" size="25" type="text" /></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td><input name="submit" type="submit" value="submit" /></td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>

Code

The backend code to function the submit request

decode($response);
        foreach($decoded->users as &$user) {
             // $user = $decoded->users;
                $name = $user->name;
                $icon = $user->icon;
                $registered = $user->registered;
                $profileviews = $user->profileviews;
                              function timestamp_to_date ($registered)
                              {
                              $date = date ('m-d-Y' , $registered);
                              echo $date;
                              }
                echo "<div id=\"archivebox\">";
                echo "<h2><img src="\" alt="" />";
                echo "$name";
                echo "User Since: ";
                timestamp_to_date ($registered);
                echo "";
                echo "Profile Views: $profileviews ";
                echo "</h2><h3>User Links</h3>";
                echo "<ul>";
                }
                foreach($user->links as $link) {
                $href = $link->href;
                $description = $link->description;
                echo "<li><a href="$href">$description</a></li>";
                }
                echo "</ul>";
                echo "</div>";

        } else {             //form hasn't been submitted
        $user = "elebrio";
	require("JSON.php");
	ini_set('user_agent', 'ic/1.0');
	$appkey = 'http://indexedcontent.com';
        $response = file_get_contents("http://services.digg.com/user/$user?appkey=$appkey&type=json");
        $json = new Services_JSON();
	$decoded = $json->decode($response);
        foreach($decoded->users as &$user) {
             // $user = $decoded->users;
                $name = $user->name;
                $icon = $user->icon;
                $registered = $user->registered;
                $profileviews = $user->profileviews;
                              function timestamp_to_date ($registered)
                              {
                              $date = date ('m-d-Y' , $registered);
                              echo $date;
                              }
                echo "<div id=\"archivebox\">";
                echo "<h2><img src="\" alt="" />";
                echo "$name";

                echo "User Since: ";
                timestamp_to_date ($registered);
                echo "";
                echo "Profile Views: $profileviews ";
                echo "</h2><h3>User Links</h3>";
                echo "<ul>";
                }
                foreach($user->links as $link) {
                $href = $link->href;
                $description = $link->description;
                echo "<li><a href="$href">$description</a></li>";
                }
                echo "</ul>";
                echo "</div>";
		}
?>

In order to get this code working on your site, you will need to change two variables.

• appkey – replace with your domain

   $appkey ='http://indexedcontent.com';

• user agent

   ini_set('user_agent', 'ic/1.0');

  ic/1.0 is my site’s current user agent. You can basically name this whatever you want.

Additional Resources

• http://groups.google.com/group/diggapi