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?

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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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…)

Every day I find new and exciting stuff on the Internet to do with marketing. The majority of the cutting edge stuff is in search engine optimization. SEO guys are getting bigger, faster, stronger and better every day and since the advent of web 2.0 and the growth in communities that have started its getting to be a real hotbed of intelligent thought, debate and just plain scary stuff.
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Affiliate marketing is a simple concept. The affiliate gets clicks to a merchants website. If these clicks convert to a sale within a predetermined time frame a commission is paid by the merchant to the affiliate. Often the merchant will employ an agency, a network or both to act as an intermediary between them and the affiliates and manage their campaign. Agencies and networks are paid by either a flat fee or a commission per sale. Under the commission set up it can be in the network or affiliates best interests to overlook breaches of terms and conditions - as they make more money. I’m not saying all do and I’m not saying how widespread it is (I don’t know) but when money is at stake there is always someone willing to bend the rules. (more…)