What Does "natural link Building" Mean To You?

My 2012 goal is to nail down my system so that I can rinse, and repeat. I have had some successes with some sites but I've never really nailed down how I did it...

So, I have been doing some homework and all the SEO folks who have a system that they have perfected say,"Figure out how to replicate what 'natural link building' looks like, then automate it."

To me replicating natural link building would mean to get a bunch of diverse ( combo of web 2.0's, book marks, comments, directories, ect.), authoritative, and in subject backlinks? Of course this is assume that your on page SEO is perfect.

For those of you who have your SEO system nailed down, is this it? Or am I missing a major key step?

to me that means blast the fuck out of my sites my motto "no such thing as natural"

starfusion said:

to me that means blast the fuck out of my sites my motto "no such thing as natural"

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lol. Love it! But that doesn't really help me nail down my SEO system....

Natural means to me "if it isn't done by me". But it's natural for me to do this

BeckyMarie said:

lol. Love it! But that doesn't really help me nail down my SEO system....

Click to expand...

1 word.... "diversification" spread your links from every kind of place you can think off don't stick to web 2.0s, blog comments etc... diverse your links and you'll see those serps rise!

People probably have very specific formula's to mimic "natural" linking... but really just ask yourself what would a "naturally popular website" look like, as far as links go?

It would have some social bookmarks, forum posts, blog posts, maybe some wikis, social buzz, a few videos... most links would be nofollow, with some strong ********, and many links wouldn't have PR... that would be "natural"... it would have a whole diverse link profile. Of course, that link profile will look different depending on your niche... a local Chiropractor won't have the same mix as a weight loss product!

starfusion said:

1 word.... "diversification" spread your links from every kind of place you can think off don't stick to web 2.0s, blog comments etc... diverse your links and you'll see those serps rise!

Click to expand...

great! now we're getting some where! Is there something beyond:

- web 2.0
- comments
- forums
- articles
- bookmarks
- social media

And how do "those people" get a page to the 1 page of google in a week? For the few I have succeeded it took me months ( even with out sourcing and with an aged domain!)

GREAT ADVICE ! I'm starting to see what everyone means!

MagicMike said:

with some strong ********!

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Please tell me what the ***************** is?!?! After all it's Christmas!

BeckyMarie said:

great! now we're getting some where! Is there something beyond:

- web 2.0
- comments
- forums
- articles
- bookmarks
- social media

And how do "those people" get a page to the 1 page of google in a week? For the few I have succeeded it took me months ( even with out sourcing and with an aged domain!)

Click to expand...

You have to look deeper into those catergories for example :

Comments : Comments on wordpress sites, comments on pligg sites etc.. different extensions give different diversification.

How do those people get to page one in a week?

testing... and more testing... not only that, keyword research,

every site's success boils down to keyword research, if thats not done properly, the site is certain to fail, unless your are going paid traffic method "ppc" etc...

Diversity in ALL things is what makes a link profile look more natural...

Not just link types/platforms, but also with the content, anchors text and footprint of your backlinking pattern. Anchors need to be highly varied post panda, with loads of extended phrase-matched anchors, brand/URL anchors and generic mixed anchors. Content obviously needs to be unique, but consider how it looks to do a blast of links all at the same time to the same domains, with similar anchors.

You need to think outside the box and not just reduce diversity to link-type. Avoiding a footprint is so much more than that.

Different sources, different ips and constant linkbuilding.

BeckyMarie said:

GREAT ADVICE ! I'm starting to see what everyone means!

Please tell me what the ***************** is?!?! After all it's Christmas!

Click to expand...

If just means "Do" "Follow" Links... I'm not sure why BHW always changes that word to *********.

There are way too many types of links...

Landing page links..
Authority links.. Links from sites with a lot of authority, high PR. The closer to the homepage (or high PR page), the better.
Directory links..
Siteroll links.. (on every page of the site, blogroll, footer links.)
One way links from other established niche sites.
EDU/GOV links..
Media links (radio, tv, mag, paper.)
Press release links.
Article/bio links.
RSS/Agg links.
Comment/profile links.
Reciprocal links.

Many mainly serve as just indexing links, used to get your good back links indexed (comments, RSS, etc.) However, some are very strong link types, especially if you can get homepage links from an authority site.. If you need to get a site ranked very quickly, just go over to text-link-ads.com and purchase some strong homepage links. They can be expensive, but they'll get the job done fast.

Some links are weaker, profile links for example are genearlly weak. They're not close to the homepage or any other popular page (page 57 of the member list is pretty solitary), however, like phpbuilt explained in a couple of his threads, you can build those pages up. And personally, I'd say that would be a huge factor in 'natural link building.' If that profile is all over that site, leaving comments, partaking in discussion, browsing pages.. It's going to gain authority on that site (notice on some forums, most members will have 0PR profiles, but frequent posters and administrators tend to have PR. Be one of those.)

Media links are tougher to get. Unless you make the news or something on a regular basis, you'll have to come up with sneaky ways to get links here. Usually their comment systems are just Disqus, so no help there.

One way links are great. (Think sponsor pages, affiliate pages, etc.) Especially since you can get on many sponsor pages for a few bucks.

Directory links as well, such as DMOZ and Yahoo. Yahoo $costs$ and I've never really bothered getting into DMOZ, heard it's a bitch and unlikely.

All that said, I like a solid mixture of forum profiles (especially since I built a tool to crawl forums and build PR to profiles), web 2.0 links, siteroll links (text-link-ads, Fiverr) and one way links. Personally. I believe it's fairly natural looking and easy to accomplish.

Of course it's all dynamic and totally depends on what my competition is bringing to the table (and my budget.) Not to mention I'm always learning new ways to not only find links but improve them, usually thanks to BHW.

jascoken said:

Diversity in ALL things is what makes a link profile look more natural...

Not just link types/platforms, but also with the content, anchors text and footprint of your backlinking pattern. Anchors need to be highly varied post panda, with loads of extended phrase-matched anchors, brand/URL anchors and generic mixed anchors. Content obviously needs to be unique, but consider how it looks to do a blast of links all at the same time to the same domains, with similar anchors.

You need to think outside the box and not just reduce diversity to link-type. Avoiding a footprint is so much more than that.

Click to expand...

Great info... but this just made my brain spin. Could someone just give me a road map. lol.

OH My gosh! Gold mine of info. This really helped a lot. Thank you for taking the time to write all of this!

I posted a similar thread, on a similar board and go NO where near this amount of good information.

Now the next question. Where does everyone get, or learn how to get there amazing back links? I've been out sourcing, but I think doing both out sourcing and doing the work myself would work best!

meatro said:

There are way too many types of links...
Landing page links..
Authority links.. Links from sites with a lot of authority, high PR. The closer to the homepage (or high PR page), the better.
Directory links..
Siteroll links.. (on every page of the site, blogroll, footer links.)
One way links from other established niche sites.
EDU/GOV links..
Media links (radio, tv, mag, paper.)
Press release links.
Article/bio links.
RSS/Agg links.
Comment/profile links.
Reciprocal links.

Many mainly serve as just indexing links, used to get your good back links indexed (comments, RSS, etc.) However, some are very strong link types, especially if you can get homepage links from an authority site.. If you need to get a site ranked very quickly, just go over to text-link-ads.com and purchase some strong homepage links. They can be expensive, but they'll get the job done fast.

Some links are weaker, profile links for example are genearlly weak. They're not close to the homepage or any other popular page (page 57 of the member list is pretty solitary), however, like phpbuilt explained in a couple of his threads, you can build those pages up. And personally, I'd say that would be a huge factor in 'natural link building.' If that profile is all over that site, leaving comments, partaking in discussion, browsing pages.. It's going to gain authority on that site (notice on some forums, most members will have 0PR profiles, but frequent posters and administrators tend to have PR. Be one of those.)

Media links are tougher to get. Unless you make the news or something on a regular basis, you'll have to come up with sneaky ways to get links here. Usually their comment systems are just Disqus, so no help there.

One way links are great. (Think sponsor pages, affiliate pages, etc.) Especially since you can get on many sponsor pages for a few bucks.

Directory links as well, such as DMOZ and Yahoo. Yahoo $costs$ and I've never really bothered getting into DMOZ, heard it's a bitch and unlikely.

All that said, I like a solid mixture of forum profiles (especially since I built a tool to crawl forums and build PR to profiles), web 2.0 links, siteroll links (text-link-ads, Fiverr) and one way links. Personally. I believe it's fairly natural looking and easy to accomplish.

Of course it's all dynamic and totally depends on what my competition is bringing to the table (and my budget.) Not to mention I'm always learning new ways to not only find links but improve them, usually thanks to BHW.

Click to expand...

Doing the work yourself always works best, I don't outsource any of my link building (of course I've never built links for a client either.) I'd rather not have links to my page surrounded by other links, especially for Nike shoes and big dick pills.

The closest I come to that is XRumer, and even that I don't use in its conventional sense. I feed it ScrapeBoxed URLs for my footprint ("powered by whatever,") then I check those links for live links, then I check live links for PR, then I focus on whatever PR threshold I set (PR4+, whatever.) I then work on getting those links indexed, I actually made a bot to help out with this, it logs into VBulletin forums and browses around active profiles dropping links back to my profile. I don't do gigantic 100K blasts trying to index every stupid thing. That's a waste of time and resources.

For a lot of 2.0 sites, you don't really have a choice but to find them and sign up by hand. Of course ScrapeBox helps a lot for harvesting, I just search for whatever generic footprint like inurlrofile "create account," then find the highest PR ones, check out the profiles to see what kind of back links they offer, if none move on, if good then sign up, make a profile, go to a couple other profiles, comment on something stupid and move on.
I'm working on a bot that does this also, once you train it to signup/login/post content to specific site or platform, it remembers and can repeat the process plus save it and share it with others.

Much of it is just being creative. Always be looking out for that "homepage" field and filling it in every chance. If you see a site that you think does great SEO, check out their back links and see if you can figure out how to do it yourself. Also, getting ahold of some good footprints and remembering there's 50 gazillion websites on the internet.

inurl:register "create account" cat
will have 1,000 different results from
inurl:register "create account" mouse
(for the most part.)

However, like it's been said. Diversity is the key. If you plan on having just a few link types, think again. You need to have a little bit of everything, preferably a lot of everything. If you create a stable SEO platform for your website, you will be able to do just about anything you want as far as your campaign. For example, you're not going to tank Yahoo.com with a bunch of shitty back links from shady sources. Their SEO platform is too stable. They have too much of everything.

Social media helps a lot with this as well as eating up SERPs with your own content. You can usually get your Facebook page pretty high in the rankings and if it's directed to your content, that's another authority page in that niche that's yours. (Note, this also helps out a lot with protecting your brand online from competitors and overall dicks.)

Natural link building to me is manually going to websites/directories and submitting your link, one-by-one.
It's rare to find people doing natural link building nowadays with so many automated programs.

natural = build a good site that other people will link to voluntarily and you won't have to do it yourself

@ meatro - You're clearly a genius.

slow link building is natural