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?