SeaWaves Blog

A couple days ago, I wrote about long-term link building. I said the best links to get in the long-term were the ones that were naturally given.

However, oftentimes it’s hard to get natural links. As webmasters learned about PageRank, many of them became stingy with their links. Even bloggers don’t link out like they used to.

If you can’t get naturally given links, you can still get links that look natural. Here are some principles to consider.

A good way to understand natural linking is to look at the opposite. What links don’t look natural to Google? The big G definitely hates the three P’s: poker, porn, pills. Don’t get links from sites that link out to these niches. Use this bad neighborhood tool to help you evaluate sites.

Relevancy is key. Try to get most of your links from sites in the same niche. It doesn’t look natural if most of your links come from off-topic sites.

Don’t get too many links from sites that are blatantly selling links. For example, try to stay away from Pay Per Post or Review Me blogs. If you do get links from them, make sure the blogs don’t have the Pay Per Post or Review Me badges in a prominent position on their layout.

Get links from sites doing well in Google. I like to use the SEO Digger tool to determine if a Google likes a certain site. This tool estimates how many popular keywords a site is ranking for in the top 20 of the SERPs.

General sites with many different topics sometimes pass link juice. However, these sites are risky. If a Google spambuster were to look at them, the links may be discounted. Before getting a link from a general site, look at the its content. Can you see many obvious paid links? Are most of the anchor text optimized with keywords? Are most of the articles unrelated to each other? If your answer is “yes” to any of these questions, you should stay away from these sites.

Vary your anchor text. John Scott says if you buy links you should never use the same anchor text twice. Also, throw in a couple non-keyword anchor text like “click here”, “great article”, and even image links.

Get contextual links. Content-based links look the most natural. And there is evidence that Google gives the most weight to these types of links.

Reciprocal sitewide links are great if they are from relevant sites. But don’t overdo it. A sidebar with over 50 sites looks spammy and unnatural.

Finally, the best way is build natural looking links to actually get natural links. Those look the most natural Practically, this means a couple things.

Write quality content that attracts links naturally. For example, find out what people are linking out to and try to write similar material while having a unique viewpoint. Also, look for gaps in your niche. Cover important topics that no one else is covering. If you can, try to report important news before anyone else.

Write with social sites in mind so that your content gets a lot of exposure and gets passed around virally. Your content must be relevant to the social site. For example, if you want to get on Digg’s front page, write something that connects your niche to something tech related. Diggers love techy stuff. Also, you need to build friendships with the social media users so they can vote for your stuff. If you have webmaster friends, ask them for votes. Of course, offer to vote for their stuff too.

My favorite way to build natural links is to build relationships with other webmasters. Then, in a non-spammy way send them some of your content. Oftentimes they’ll link to you because friends like to link to friends. If you have really good targeted content, you can email bloggers without a prior relationship. Many bloggers are on the lookout for interesting content. Here is a good case study of this marketing tactic.

It’s takes more time, but if you can get 50 quality links that look natural, you can outrank a site with 1000 spammy, unnatural links.