I don’t need to go on about the importance of links in relation to your natural search positions. We all know that having great links leads to great positions.

One of the things that I’d heard could be affecting your natural search performance is whether these great links you’ve been out link baiting, link spamming or have been growing organically to your web sites is whether they created a link profile that was seen as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. I’ve seen unnatural link profiles referred to as ‘artifical’. I prefer unnatural as you could develop an unnatural link profile without doing anything on purpose - artifical indicates to me, at least, that you’ve been actively going out of your way to get links.

Having a natural link profile is what every website apparently needs to consistently rank well for all of its appropriate search terms. Unnatural link patterns are suppossed to damge your search engine positions, at least in the short term.

I’ve been thinking about this ideas for a while and it seems logical. Unnatural linking = Spamming = penalty in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Before I could go and test out this I had to define were natural and unnatural link profiles.

What is a ‘natural link’ profile?

A natural link profile is one that grows organically with no, or little, interference.

I believe that natural link prfoiles would have five defining components:

1. Links likely to grow at a consistent rate
2. The majority of links are on pages, within sites, on a related themes
3. These pages would be unlikely to have high PageRank
4. Links would often be within fresh content
5. Links would often be in non-duplicate content

I know these rules are subjective but I felt they could be used as a way to use a system of trigger level penalties: when your link profile displays an unnatural level of any of these the penalty starts to interact with your rankings.

• Links could grow dramatically to your domain - but these links could be natural if they were to a page about a hot topic. So there would be a trigger point inside the search engine algorithm to give leeway for this.
• It is likely that not all links would be on topic, nor should they ever be - human variation in language etc would determine that some links would be seen as ‘off topic’ by a search engine. Espescially when you have a brand name that means nothing in itsel: I was thinking about Diageo or something similar.
• Having exclusively links from high PageRank pages may indicate that you are operating within a hot topic again, or you could be spamming. The natural distribution curve for your website will be different from other websites but there may be points in time when your natural distribution changes drastically in terms of PageRank.

What is an ‘unnatural link’ profile?

If a natural link profile conforms to the rules above, but doesn’t need to obey all five at the same time. An unnatural link profile would be one where the rules of natural linking were broken often enough to trigger the filter(s).

This would be reasonably simple for a search engine to use as you could use threshhold trigger points within an algorithm to indicate when a website went from having a natural to an unnatural link proflile and vice versa, with various stages inbetween.

Testing Natural and Unnatural Link profiles

Base line test involved:

1. Five domains
2. All had been spidered for more than three months
3. No keywords in the domain names
4. All were .co.ukdomain extensions
5. All hosted on the same server

I’ll be putting the test results in our next post. If you have any thoughts in advance of our publishing the results please let us know.

For a while I’ve been thinking more and more that Matt Cutts, aka Google Guy,  blog is becoming less relevant to me. It’s became a mecca for lots of non-seo noise that is starting to block out the good stuff that he used to post about Google and SEO.

In the past he posted some really cool stuff, that was useful to everyone from web developers to Internet marketers. Some great posts included:

• Backing up Aaron Wall of SEO Book
• 301 redirects
• BMW getting kicked out of Google

Increasingly I find that posts to be of less relevance. due to his I’ve started to use the official Google Blog more and more as a source of info about what’s going on at the search engine and referring less and less to Matts site.

Does anyone still think that Matt Cutts blog has the same level of information as it used to?

I’ve posted before about how great FeedBurner is for getting your feed subscriber stats. However I do feel that it has a major failing - it doesn’t give you your link love back. And as someone who loves the free links that you can get from using your RSS feed appropriately having a feed in feedburner becomes a non option.
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I just saw today that Microsft have launched their equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. I was really interested to have a look at this.

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Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a wee trend emerging at Google. In the run up to christmas they seem to mess about with their algorithm. This could be completely normal and just the way that the dice fall on the Search Engine craps table or these dice could be loaded in favour of the house.
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Have been writing a post for a couple of days about the Google PageRank update that has been getting the goat of so many people just now. I have to say I haven’t seen any change apart from a small drop here and a small drop there but nothing on the scale I keep hearing about. I don’t know enough to add anything to the current debate, yet, so I thought I’d post about some nifty little bits and pieces that I’ve been seeing in Google Webmaster Tools (formerly Google sitemaps).
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But god I wish I could

Over the last couple of months a couple of clients, or their internal representatives known as account managers, have been saying things that get on my nerves. Some of these have kinda got to me. Its got the stage where I’ve been wishing I could just say this or just say that to them. In an attempt to awaken them from inaction, torpor of just crass stupidity
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Sometimes the mind just boggles when you’re doing some competitive research. The more you look at some backlinks the more it doesn’t make sense. Today while doing some backlink analysis for a large power generating and distribution company in the UK I took an interest in the backlinks generated to uSwitch.

High up in site explorer backlink set for uSwicth and in third position appears the Financial Times, http://www.ft.com. So at this point my interest is piqued. Why would the homepage for the Financial Times link to uSwitch? (more…)

Discovering new places to get your RSS feed syndicated is an exciting business. I can hear you laughing from here! If you can find someone willing to syndicate your content, especially if the syndication source is ‘on topic’, you could have constantly developing links, pointing to your new pages when they go live, and you get to control your anchor texts - try getting that from a standard directory.
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I was just wandering through the web, I can’t even remember what I was looking for (I hate it when that happens don’t you), and came across some stuff from Dan Theis on Building Website Structures. He was talking about using ‘nofollow’ on links to funnel PageRank onto specific pages within a site structure. Is a compelling read - is similar to an idea that Peter Hoggan developed a while back, about two and half years ago, but he used Javascript instead. (Pete explained it by using the PageRank calculator tool). (more…)