A natural/organic link is not necessarily “the opposite of the unnatural link”. It is much more than that.

And although unnatural links are in fashion, maybe its time to put the spotlight on the organic links.

What is a Natural Link?

Natural links refer to those links that are put on websites without a direct intention of influencing the rankings of Google (at least from the POV of Google). These are called natural links because they haven’t been elicited in any way. As mentioned in the Webmaster Tools Help, Google considers to be a vote of confidence a link that page A makes to page B. These “votes”, usually,  help your site rank higher in the search engine. The thing is that this vote, the link, has to be made naturally, meaning that you don’t have to influence in any way someone’s decision to link to you. Shortly, natural link building means that no explicit agreement to exchange or place links was done.

Natural Links are an investment that will pay dividends on the long term!

You might be stuffed with it, but let me illustrate the natural/unnatural dilemma with an example from politics. Elections are in full swing and you, the citizen, have to decide which mayor would be the best for your city. Your vote will be considered sincere and also legal only if your choice will be made solely because you agree with someone’s political agenda or you think that a certain person fits best the role of the mayor of your city. If a candidate or someone from his staff try to “buy” your vote with money or by offering you goods or services, that vote won’t be based on that candidate’s political qualities anymore, will it? That vote will not be relevant and might also bring some legal consequences. The same things apply when it comes to natural links. They need to be obtained organically, without anyone trying to manipulate the situation.

Natural Link Synonyms

Natural links may be found “in the wild” under the following names:

• organic links
• good links
• ok links
• high quality links
• Google friendly links

Why “Natural” & “Link” in the same phrase?

Talking about a “natural” link building strategy might sound like an oxymoron. As they first appear, links were all natural and even now, links are supposed to be natural, right? Yes, I feel the hand of reality slapping me, so allow me to rephrase that.

As the digital world got bigger and bigger, webmasters began to feel smaller and smaller. Site owners started to feel insignificant if not lost in the incredibly large web. The need to create link strategies that will speed up the process and put webmasters in their dream place, the search engines’ first page, increased proportionally with the digital world.

For someone to naturally click on the most relevant site for his search query would mean that he would know all the content from all the sites that exist.

Pretty utopian, isn’t it? How the “natural” process really goes is that users link to the most relevant sites they find from a predefined list of webpages. They don’t really give their vote of confidence to the site with the best content that there is but to the one that is most relevant to him from “the short list” of webpages which is available. With almost 80% of users clicking on links that they find on the very first page of a search engine’s responses, everybody wants to be on that list. Who designs those “short lists”? Algorithms do. The people behind those algorithms are continually seeking to improve their ability in identifying which sites are to be trusted and which not. The sites that appear on the “short list” may be the ones that know how to “dance” along with the ranking factors and not necessary the ones with the most relevant content for a certain matter.

Google’s algorithm job is to spot signals of naturalness. The webmaster’s job is to act as natural as possible. But what happens when the algorithm changes? An action that was considered natural until then can pass as unnatural now. Huge amounts of money are being lost or won based on the algorithm’s rules. It’s a cycle that repeats every day, week, month, year. I think the Ralph Tegtmeier (aka @fantomaster) puts the finger on the problem in the following video:

Link Earning

The concept of link earning puts together all the qualitative efforts that a webmaster does in order to gain organic links. The key to this strategy might be crafting your content for your readership and not for Google. The new SEO context might oblige us to forget about link building and start focusing more and more on link earning.

Here are some methods of earning links:

• Generate original information

A good place where you can put your effort into is original analysis and research. Netizens are more than glad to find out new, interesting things. If you really dig in to find something and you generate interesting facts, you are more likely to get links. We’re doing this a lot at cognitiveSEO, so, let the links come to us! 🙂 The good part with generating original research is that it is not just about linking, it is about sticking in someone’s mind or making a really big difference in a specific area.

You must create content that you yourself would go out of your way and read.

• Be active in social media

Think of where people spend most of their time. That’s right; on Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, etc. If your users spend 4 hours a day on facebook, maybe you should start spending some time there too. You don’t have to just wait for your possible customers to come to you, you may need to pay them a visit. Being active in social media can pay off in lots of ways, not just links. You get to know your target and you can also find new opportunities for your business.

• Share your knowledge

Yes, “how to’s” and tutorials is what I am talking about. If you’ve managed to do something or you discovered how to make something faster or easier, you could help other people by making a tutorial about it. It will be highly appreciated in the online world. Even if you don’t get the pile of links you were hoping for, but you will bring exposure to your brand.

Content for the “Long tail ” only needs a couple of link to rank high.

As I mentioned before, sometimes it’s not just about the links; it’s about having a resource that no one else has. In the long run it will pay off.

• Community Building

Community building is a long term investment that will pay off on the long term.

You can obtain natural links from creating content that is not only relevant and useful but that will have the power to attract links from bloggers, people from forums, blog comments, etc.

• Answer Questions Online

I am talking about answering the many questions people have in the online world. On a forum, for instance, you can answer to a question about how to get rid of some spyware. If your answer will bring the solution or any added value, the community will appreciate. It is likely that they remember that you “saved” them in some situation and most likely they will reword you with a link. So, helping other people can be a big way to do it. Don’t expect to win the Nobel Peace Prize but you may expect an investment that will pay dividends on the long term.

• Offer a Free Service to Your Community

Run a service that people find really useful or something that improves others’ experience in the digital world. For instance, you can create a browser extension. I am sure that you are familiar with the AdBlock extension. This extension is an open source that generated millions of downloads and a pretty nice amount of money made from donations. As you can see, people are grateful and willing to pay off as long as their experience as a user is improved. What is great about offering a service is that you can do the work once and on the long term lots of people will pay you off in links.

Techniques that Don’t Involve Great Content

It is hard to say that there are techniques that won’t rely great content. Let’s see, though, what we can find in this field:

• Controversy

You don’t have to be a tabloid to obtain buzz and links. You don’t have to make a profession out of gossiping or hating everybody either but some controversy might give you a boost of traffic now and then.

Done with measure, some controversy generates a lot of links but is not a long term strategy.

There will be a boost in the beginning but at some point, people will pay less and less attention to you. You don’t want to be like the boy that cried “wolf” and afterwards, no one believed him anymore. If you always get busy with saying “look at me, I am being loud, you have to pay a lot of attention to me”, you may irreparably lose your authority and credibility.

• Site Architecture

I know it may sound common but sometimes we tend to take for granted the little things. You have to make sure that your site has a good site architecture. What is the easiest way to find out? Answer to these questions: Can your site be crawled? Can your site be bookmarked? Can Google or the user get to all the pages on your site? If the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know for sure”, you need to take a look at your site before doing anything else. If your site is broken your changes of being linked at are almost Zero.

• Offline Activities and Branding

Being hooked in the online world we often forget about the great opportunities that the offline world brings. If you forgot about outdoor and smart unconventional advertising and brand building, it’s a good time you bring them back into your playground.

• Newsletters

Another way in which you can drive traffic, conversions and ultimately links are  Newsletters. They might look a bit out of fashion but they still work. This way you make it easier for your public to have your information show up in their inbox and, therefore, easier to click on it.

Common Mistakes

You did everything by the book, but the results don’t look as you expected. So, what could have possible happened? I’ll list three common mistakes that may occur in the “link zone”.

1. You were too busy creating a link building strategy

Your job is not just creating a link building strategy. If your main activity will be focused on building links for search engines, you are cutting off a lot of avenues.

Before being preoccupied with how to get links, you have to build something really attractive, a reason why people would want to link to you.

After you managed that, don’t forget that there is more than the online world. There is a broader area of offline marketing out there that can bring you the links you wish for. You need to get rid of the tunnel vision focused on just links and start marketing your website without thinking about search engines but about your consumer instead.

You use the wrong keywords on your site.

For instance, you’ve just opened a great sushi restaurant in Manhattan. You don’t want to just say “sushi” but you want to include words like “where do I find the best sushi in Manhattan” etc, because it is very likely for people to search for “sushi manhattan”. Think about what the user is going to type and include those words on your page. You need to do a proper keyword research for your own site. Also, let’s say you have a car service shop. Post a list with all the services you have to offer on your site but not in a jpg or pdf format, but in plain text. Put your business hours on your page. It is very likely for people to look for a car service open till late and you might be the one who offers this service;

That piece of information can generate a link and, further on, a client.

You’ve messed up the title or the description of your page

You want to have something that people will actually click on when they see it on the search results.

What is your home page title? If, for instance, I am going to bookmark it, will I easily understand later what was really about or is the title not very suggestive? Also, your description will show up in the snippet and that synopsis can be a link generator or, on the contrary, a turn off for the user.

Conclusion

It is hard to tell whether a 100% natural link building strategy will get you on the first pages of the search engine in a favorable period of time. But one thing is for sure: while techniques and strategies come and go, organic links will always remain.

Everything you are doing is first of all for the audience and not for the search engines.

There is no (or shouldn’t be) such a thing as a manual on how to build links organically, or how to create the exact type of content that results in valuable links. There are some guidelines you need to follow and some directions you can track that can help you have a natural, worry- free link profile.

Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The post Organic Links – What they are and How to get them? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Update: This is the complete case study of the Halifax Google Penalty. We updated it with EXTRA Juicy info and made a cool illustration also!

A breaking news has just reached our eyes and we found it so interesting and exciting that we couldn’t leave our office in a Friday afternoon until we shared this boiling piece of information with you. And before you assume we probably didn’t have any plans for this evening, read the article and we’ll talk after.

Halifax may be one of the best and prosperous cities in the world, but when it comes to the famous UK banking chain Halifax, we cannot say the same thing. At least not anymore. The only thing the city of Halifax and Halifax bank have now in common is that they are both hard to find; first one on the map and the other on Google.

Looks like Google started 2014 with its engine at a maximum revolution, setting the bar high when it comes to penalties, regardless of the size or importance of the site.

The Halifax bank is the UK’s largest provider of residential mortgages and saving accounts, founded about 150 years … before Google existed. Basically, by the time Google was working at its initial public offering, the Halifax bank established one of the first telephone and Internet based banks. And if you’re still not convinced that Halifax’s tradition and reputation has deep roots, you should know that they were founded before the invention of the cash register, electric bulb or Coca Cola.

Thereby, they deserve a front-page case study.

As famous and notorious as they are, their link building strategy might not be very “Google friendly”, as they are facing now high difficulties and big rumbles in the online world. From our analysis, it seems like they’ve been penalized and Google might add an turning point in their impressive history.

The Financial Niche in UK

The financial niche in UK has very interesting characteristics that might need a different article; not on our blog, don’t worry. Without overwhelming you with bank details, that will only give you headaches, allow me to give you a few tips about this niche. Financial competition in the UK isn’t much of a competition in the way that since 2008 until now just five big banks own 85% of market share.

Why is this piece of information so important for us?

Well, it should help us make a clear image about how significant this story is and how big the actors really are. In other words, Halifax is a very big player in the field that lost not only image points but also pounds. Thousand of pounds!

20% Google Halifax Google Drop 

Bellow we can see the Halifax visibility history over the past two years.  Looking at the following chart we can easily see a dramatically downhill that started at the beginning of February and looks like it it keeps on dropping. Google’s “red card” reflected on Halifax’s online visibility and the bank dropped in ranking about 20%.

As we look at the following chart we can easily see a dramatically downhill that started at the beginning of February and looks like it keeps on dropping.

Halifax Dropped Keywords

Only 20%, one might say; “that’s not such of a big penalty after all”. In fact, it is.

If we analyze the keywords Halifax actually “lost”, you might have a better understanding of why you wouldn’t want to step in Halifax’s shoes right now. As I was saying before about the bank established on the old continent, Halifax is synonymous with loans, saving accounts, online banking. If we take a look at the chart below what do we see?

The core of their business, their top keywords are in a serious downward trend. “Personal loans”, “saving accounts” or “home loans” are not even listed in the first 100 anymore. That’s quite a stab!

The 20% don’t seem to look so negligible any more, don’t you think?

Who is responsible for the drop?

Well, this is an interesting issue to discuss. When a problem appears, we have a natural, almost uncontrollable desire to find the scapegoat.

Who will it be this time? Halifax for not keeping an eye wide open at its online activity? The media agency responsible for Halifax’s online marketing strategies? Google itself for not making plain statements, clear regulations and changing the rules of the game as it goes?

All involved parties reacted differently to this story but the media agency that “took care” of Halifax caught our attention.

If about a year ago they proudly shared their strategy and results they had on Halifax on their blog, now that specific article is not to be found anywhere as it was deleted the day that Halifax probably got the Google penalty.

Since we are technology addicts, we were able to easily find that article using Web Archive.

In the article in question, unbeatable figures were highlighted: natural search visitors volume was with 244% higher than in the previous year, sales percentage increased and was in alignment with visitors increase and, maybe, most important asset, Google market data showed Halifax as most visible street bank for ISA (individual saving accounts) related search.

Fast forward one year later …

Google penalized Halifax for keywords such as ISA and loans. I’ll let you draw the conclusions on who should share the blame; but no matter whom you’ll find responsible for all this, Halifax’s penalty is still on.

How did everything begin?

This is exactly what we wanted to find out and what better way to investigate this story than using the cognitiveSEO tool. In the chart bellow it’s outlined the biggest Spike of new links in Halifax links’ history and, brace yourself, you will see over 460.000 links on about 190 referring domains only. Quite a baffling ratio between links and domains, don’t you think?

To better understand what really happened, we took a fast peek on the last 90 days link acquisition chart and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to notice that in mid of December something happened. While kids put the final touches on their Christmas wish list, Halifax received an earlier “present”, a huge big Spike of new links.

However, if they receive “presents” earlier, they also begin the spring cleaning earlier.

At the end of January, after all winter holidays have passed,  we can see that the number of lost links begin to increase suddenly.  Given the fact that before this time, the number of lost links had the same approximate pattern, we could say that they probably began cleaning the links, due to the Google Penalty.

The tool helped us easily identify the unnatural links and understand the unnatural to ok link ratio for the entire link profile. As the following chart suggests, the site seems to have a highly unnatural link profile and it’s likely to be penalized by Google.

From our in house case studies, sites that have over 20% unnatural links are at high risk to be flagged by the Google Algorithm for bad practices.

If you are still skeptic about the shady practices used by Halifax you should check the following screenshots.

Let me outline the top 3 shady link building strategies Halifax used.

Shady Link Building Strategy 1 – Web Directory Links.

Let’s take a look at this web directory. At a first glance, the site is looking quite good; it has high quality domain and link authority. If we look at the details we see a do follow commercial anchor text link.

The problem is that this isn’t the single webdirectoy link. There are a bunch and they were built quite fast as we see in the Unnatural reasons spotted by the tool.

Extreme Link Velocity – We might be living in the speed century but this looks very unnatural.

Shady Link Building Strategy 2 – Easily Pattern-able Links 

Trying to initiate ourselves in the “magic” link building strategy Halifax bank’s site used, we took some other snapshots from different links that are identified as being unnatural. In the image below we can see a technique, which purpose is to make Google believe that the highlighted words represent a short paragraph of text used in the content of the site but what we are actually talking about is a hidden commercial anchor posted sideways on a low quality site.

Not that magic anymore, is it?

It’s like you are driving on the highway and all the advertising banners on the roadside are trying to invade the road, standing in your way.

The following snapshot is a re-validation of the fact that a pattern was used in making commercial anchor text look like it’s an important part in the site’s content when it actually appears to be a suspect widget. And yes, I know, everything has to do with banks: cars, houses, hospitals and bars; but mentioning the great advantageous Halifax’s bank loans on a wide range of terms, such as hybrid cars, oil prices and general news? I think you all agree with me when I say that this looks quite shady.

Shady Link Building Strategy 3 – Advertorials (paid posts)

As we can see in the screenshot above they also used a paid post strategy to acquire “search engine friendly” links. As a visual trace that might indicate this is a paid post, they have an image in the footer that says:

The Halifax link is an in-content & do-follow link enriched with commercial anchor text. That is a pretty shady thing usually. The same “advertorial” technique was also used by Interflora, when they got their site penalized by Google.

Looking at the following link we can only imagine a link network of low quality sites. That is not something that a bank would naturally get a commercial anchor text link from.

Was this Negative SEO?

After all said and done, was it negative SEO? Did Halifax’s competitors pointed thousands of negative backlinks with the clear intention to influence organic search rankings in their favor? Doesn’t seem the case this time, as all the strategies listed above appear to be a part of an assumed tactic. Also, the SEO agency in charge for their online marketing campaign talked pretty clear and artless in the erased article published on their blog about the strategy they used in order to increase Halifax’s visibility online.

Halifax Current Situation

In these troubled waters, it’s important to know how Halifax sails. First of all, as we outlined in one of the charts above, it looks like the “cleaning” process has already begun. As the number of lost links increases, the more natural and reliable their profile will begin to look. Their very quick response to this matter is worth appreciating and I am not sure if you feel the same about this but I guess their chief accountant does.

The Good Stuff at Halifax

We know there is not much milk & honey at Halifax currently, but we can’t make a full analysis without taking into account the good things Halifax has. For instance, let’s take a look at their “natural” appearance. There is, indeed a high percentage of unnatural links but the natural ones come as a counterbalance. Also, let’s not forget who are we talking about: a well-known bank that came out with their head up from several crashes and severe economic crisis during the years. We are not saying that this isn’t a nasty blow but we do think that Halifax has the necessary expertise to get through this unpleasant episode and get a fast recovery.

Conclusion

Having sites like Expedia and Halifax penalized by Google sends a strong signal that not even the big “guys” have a chance in the face of Google. They might get faster recoveries than smaller sites but still they can get penalized the same way a normal site is.

As we have seen, the SEO team, that is/was working at Halifax, already started to remove the bad links that are the cause of this drop.  I am sure that the site will be back on tracks soon but this will require a better SEO strategy from their digital marketing team.

PS: My special thanks go to Martin Macdonald for spotting this drop.

The post How Google Broke the Bank – The Famous Halifax Penalty appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Genuine Guest Posting works by engaging with audiences that are interested in your content.

Guest posting is still widely used as a “link building tool”, for generating contextually relevant links. When it is mostly used  as a “link building tool”, it will eventually blow up in your face with a Google Penalty.

Penalties for mass scale and shady guest blogging will surely come in the near future.  As Matt Cutts says in the following video:

There’s definitely a lot of abuse and growing spam that we see in the guest blogging space.

Regardless of the spam technique people are using from month to month we’re always looking at what sort of things are started to be more and more abused. We’re always willing to respond to that and take the appropriate action to make sure the users get the best set of search results.

The first thing that would trigger a guest blogging penalty will surely be a high amount of guest blog do-follow links pointing to your site.

In order to be prepared for any future penalties related to Guest Blogging we added to cognitiveSEO, a new detection pattern that we named:

“Author Signature”

Good Author Signature Example.

Spammy Author Signature Example

Now, when we crawl your entire link profile we will also search for footprints that are found in the signature that is usually found on Guest Posts.

Here is a research that I have done on some random sites that I picked up.

Qudos-animations.co.uk

This site has a mixed link acquisition strategy. It is mostly related to blog commenting, widgets and guest posts. As you can see 14% of the links are coming from guest posts.  This includes both do-follow and no-follow links.

Here is low quality guest post that has commercial anchor text also. It is clear the intent of this post and it is from any point of view an unnatural link.

Another guest post from this site is this one.

The intent of this guest post was not only to get a link but it is contextually relevant post about using video in the pharma markets.

I would rate this as a great post, except the fact that the link is a do-follow link, which puts it in the list of links that might raise a red-flag to Google.

But maybe this site has the majority of the guest post links coming from No-Follow links. Let’s see:

It’s not the case. They have 19% of the all the do-follow links coming from Guest-Posts. So it is clear that this is a used with high priority as a “link building tool”.

Manifestconnection.com

This is another site that uses the “guest posting” as a “link building strategy” only.

To understand this we need to look at the following charts:

All Live Links

We see a big chunk of backlinks are coming from author signatures. We filter by Do-Follow and we get this:

Live + Do-Follow Links Only

We see an even bigger majority of links coming from guest posts and they are posted on both blogs and article directories.

To quickly get an idea about the quality of these posts I just browse around and here are some examples:

and

We can easily see the link building intent on these guest posts with commercial anchor text. The quality of both the sites that these are posted on and of the actual content is quite low.

These kind of strategies will surely be penalized, if they are not already.

In order to best manage your Guest Blogging Risk, that of being penalized in the future for the shady guest blogging stuff that you did in the past, you should be aware of the following:

• How much of my link profile is made out of Guest Blog links?
• How many are No-follow/Do-follow?
• How many use Commercial anchor text?

Once you know this you can protect your site by taking action prior to a future penalty:

• Start diluting your link profile with high quality natural links, in order to minimize the impact of the shady Guest Blog links in your link profile.
• Change some of the Commercial Guest Post links in your link profile. Switch the links to No-Follow or change the Commercial Anchor Text used. These are potential major triggers to a future guest blogging penalty. Dilute them!

If you want to stay on the safe side, I would recommend following these principles:

• Do not use Guest Blogging as a mass scale “link building tool”.
• If you often link to your site form Guest Posts use no-follow links as much as you can. (you need to remember that the purpose of your guest post is to build awareness & engagement … not juicy ranking links)
• Rarely use Commercial Anchor Text in you Guest Post links that are pointing to your site.
• Do not guest blog the same article on different sites.
• Do not piss people off with “blind guest blog” request.

And don’t forget this one:

Guest Post on relevant sites mostly.

So now that you know all this stuff, you should analyze your site and understand your “Guest Blogging” link profile risk.

By the way, you can check your competitors also and be informed if they are in a safe or risky situation.

You could do this manually, but it would take ages.

We specially created this feature for you, so that you could easily understand the risk you or your competitors are facing when the Guest Post Google Update will come.

14 day Free Trial!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post How to manage your “Guest Blogging” Risk – Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.