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?

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

We’re beta testing a new keyword rankings tool that pulls data from the Seodigger.com api. It’s basically one api call to seodigger specifying the domain to search for and a variable that limits results. We then wrap it up in some pretty css via jquery. Please check it out and report any bugs to ryanunderdown >at< gmail >dot< com

There are a lot of debates when it comes to Digg and people like expressing their point of view no doubt about it. but when we talk about the Digg side effects we are talking about articles who reach the first page. Of course Digg has it’s own algorithm when it comes to ranking a page high but what could really happen if we were to have articles on the first page ?

Some people say that this would be some sort of bad luck because the traffic doesn’t convert well and certainly your site will crash due to high traffic (yea right) …

I think there are way many better (if not only) advantages for your site if you get articles on the first page of digg because:

Seo Advantages: You can get a lot of links (deep links) to your site with anchor texts that really do the job because of sites who use the digg mirror service or others who compose their articles reffering to you etc. Let’s not forget about other sites that collaborate with Digg or users who use more than one social bookmarking site thus giving you tons of backlinks.

Monetizing Ads: Even though your ads won’t convert as you would want them a huge traffic spike could earn you some decent money. Altough your traffic increased 20 times and your winnings barely tripled it’s still a progress no doubt about it.

Exposure: Having your story on the first page gives you great exposure. Basically all viral campaigns made it to the first page on Digg so if you have something to say why not do it the smart way

Readers: Everybody knows John Chow and what he did, how he monetized his sites, pissed off Digg and Google etc… But the smart thing i guess nobody though of was converting Digg fans into his own. This shows us that if you have some talent (when it comes to writing) you can easily convert readers and make them your own. Guess how the first page of Digg helps in this equation

So most people who say that Digg is this or that or fear of a server crash are just “little girls” who never experienced real traffic and of course they fear it. My logical piece of advice is get as much (content oriented if possible) traffic as you can get !

P.S. If you do find the secret of placing your article on #1 page of Digg don’t forget to whisper

The recent controversy about changes to the digg.com story promotion algorithm has primarily focused on spreading out who can promote stories to the front page. I think this approach neglects a much bigger problem with the site: Linkjacked content. To remedy this, I propose a new bury function: Linkjacked.