Natural Linking

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What is natural linking?

Natural linking refers to a pattern of visible, prominent, naturally occurring links that are the result of website content creators trying to add value to their website.

Natural links:

• are surrounded by relevant text
• include a mixture of anchor text
• include a combination of homepage and deep links
• are usually built up slowly over time
• are from a wide variety of sources
• have a high ratio of links from subpages
• are not reciprocal

What is artificial linking?

Conversely, "artificial linking" are irrelevant or disguised links that add value to the link destination site, instead of the sites providing the links. These include paid links, link exchanges, "powered by" and "hosted by" links.

Artificial links:

• are surrounded by little or no relevant text
• are surrounded by navigation links
• typically have a high ratio of identical anchor text
• often are not in context with the webpage content
• typically point to the homepage
• spring up over a short period of time
• often come from a large number of webpages in a small number of sites
• have a high ratio of links from the homepage of websites
• are often reciprocal
• are at the bottom of the page

What are link triangles?

A link triangle is a concept devised to evade the detection of reciprocal linking patterns by search engines. With a link triangle, page A links to page B, page B links to page C, and page C links to page A, as illustrated below:

It is certainly an interesting concept, and one that may well fool the search engines if implemented properly with natural linking strategies.

Is there any difference between linking virtually hosted domains and domains on dedicated IP addresses?

None whatsoever according to Matt Cutts, head of the Google's Webspam team. Matt says, quote, "Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses."

Should I link to the www or non-www version of my domain?

I would recommend picking the www version and always use that in internal and inbound links.

Do not think that www and non-www version of a domain is the same. For example, most people would probably consider these URLs to be the same:

• www.yoursite.com
• www.yoursite.com/index.html
• yoursite.com
• yoursite.com/index.html

Technically they are all different. I have often encountered the dreaded "cannot find server" error message when entering the non-www version of a domain name into a web browser, only for the site to appear when I try the www version.

Make sure your webmaster sets up your site so that it appears when someone visits either the www or non-www version of the domain.

I often come across internal homepage links pointing to various URLs, including:

• index.html
• yoursite.com
• yoursite.com/index.html
• www.yoursite.com/index.html

Stick to one URL, such as www.yoursite.com, instead of all those variations above.

Site Map:

• Text Link Guide - homepage
• Text Links - search engines, link traffic
• Anchor Text - variations, misspellings
• Image Links - image maps, alt text
• PageRank - increase PageRank, attribute
• Link Popularity - authority pages, link quality, quantity, relevancy, reputation
• Sitemaps - XML, Google, generators, Yahoo!
• Linkbait
• Link Seeding - link spam
• Link Exchange - bad neighborhoods, link exchange software
• Sponsored Links - PageRank
• Affiliate Links
• Link Brokers - RON, ROS, Text Link Ads
• Natural Linking - artificial linking, link triangles, www or non-www
• Broken Links - link rot, broken link testing