Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

With paid links so high up on the radar at the Googleplex these days, it has become even more crucial that your website’s link profile is as natural as possible… even if the links themselves aren’t 100% natural. So what makes a natural link profile? Here are ten things to consider when you are getting links to your sites, both paid and organic, so your site and its link profile will be as low key as possible.

Pay attention to anchor text
What looks more natural… a ringtone site with 95% of all incoming links with “buy ringtones” as the anchor text - especially when both of those words are not in the domain name - or a ringtone website that has at least 20 variations of anchor text, with none of those non-domain-name variations having more than 15% share of the backlinks? You guessed it, the site with the wide variety of anchor texts in the incoming links. Also consider that naturally, some links will have anchor text of “click here”, “buy here”, “source” or your straight URL linked up. For more, read Choosing Your Anchor Text for Incoming Links.

Don’t solicit unnatural anchor text
If someone is linking to this blog, the natural anchor text is Jennifer Slegg. And that wouldn’t trip up any spam filters. But if I asked everyone to link to me with “Search Marketing Consultant” or “Social Media Consultant“, that would certainly trip some flags once it hit a certain percentage of my overall link profile. Why? Because it is not natural. Left on their own, perhaps one or two people might have used that anchor text, but naturally, nearly all would link to me with “Jennifer Slegg” as the anchor text, or if linking to an individual blog entry, with the blog entry title as the anchor text.

Oldie but goodies
Look at a smaller site in your niche market that has been around since well before the era of paid links. Now go an investigate their link profile. Pay special attention to links that look as though they have been around since the beginning of time, such as articles or online newsletters that are dated with the publish date. Now look at the anchor text and where those links came from to see if you could easily replicate it from either those sites or similar ones. This is helpful for those who are new to the industry, and don’t quite remember what it was like before the days of whoever-has-the-highest-paid-link-budget-wins.

Are you using nofollow with care?
Are you nofollowing every outgoing link on your site, even ones that Google has already decided is an authority. If you are nofollowing the CNNs or the Amazons of the world, you have to ask why you are doing this unless you are trying to manipulate PageRank loss from your site, and keeping it all for your own internal links. And nofollowing everything is just not natural, no matter how you slice and dice it. Only use nofollow for those sites you cannot vouch for, and give the rest of the sites your link love. Still not convinced? Read Why you should actively link out from your blog.

Don’t just get links from sites with higher PageRank than you
This was a popular tactic back in the days when everyone was emailing for link exchanges, and people would only ask for links from sites with a higher PageRank. Yes, it makes sense to get links from sites with higher PageRank than you (and yes, I will save the whole “how relevant is PageRank today” argument for another day ). But would it be natural for a PR2, or even a greybar or PR0 site, to only have incoming links from sites and pages that are PR6 or higher? You guessed it, there is nothing natural about that at all. So while lower PR sites might not give you a huge overall boost, it will definitely go a long way to making your link profile look much more natural, especially if you have some high PR paid links you have thrown into the mix.

Spread the love around
In Google’s eyes, how natural does a site look when it has 12,000 pages, yet only page on the entire site with any incoming links is the homepage? While the homepage will usually get the highest number of links overall to a site, with the exceptions a social related influx of links to an internal page, a large site without a single external link to any internal page on the site is a definite flag. Ensure your site does have links coming into its internal pages… and if not, you should either rectify it or consider reasons why people aren’t linking to anything but the homepage.

Lots of link love from one site isn’t very loving
In a dream, getting a link from every single page on a high traffic site sounds wonderful. But in reality, rarely do sites ever link to another site with a link on every single page of their own site… unless the links are either paid or they are within the same network. A single link from that same site is much more natural and healthy for your link profile.

Avoid footer links like the plague
It could be the most natural unsolicited link from a site whose webmaster just doesn’t know better when he decided to add his ten favorite sites in the footer of his homepage. But anyone looking at that footer link knows it might as well have a 500×500 animated gif above it flashing “Warning! Paid Links Below!” because even if they aren’t paid for, everyone will think they are.

Slow and steady wins the race
What do you think looks more suspicious to Google? The site that suddenly develops 300 links overnight or the site that develops 300 links added in small groups over several months? The first site will look suspicious, especially if it has other warning flags, such as being a brand new site or links with all identical anchor text. Do keep in mind that larger sites can handle more incoming links at once than smaller sites without raising suspicion. So be aware of your own link requirements and restrictions before you go overboard and know what a site your size and in your market area can handle.

Taking a sword to a gun fight?
Don’t forget to take into account competitiveness in an industry too. A site in specific highly competitive markets (ie. credit cards, poker, etc) will need many more links to rank than a site about tourist attractions in your hometown. So don’t attack both of those sites with the same link plan. The first type of site will need thousands of links from a mixture of high PR, authority and market sites, while the second site can likely achieve the desired rankings with a handful of carefully chosen links from related sites. And yes, throwing thousands of high quality links at a site that has no real competition in the serps will definitely cause it to stick out like a sore thumb when it comes to the linking profile, especially when the job could have been done with just a fraction of those links. So don’t go with your link guns blazing at a small site and don’t show up with a sword when you are playing with the big fish.

Developing a natural link profile is going to become more and more important this year, especially since Google is taking action against sites it perceives as purchasing links. So ensure you have a natural link profile for your big money sites, and if you have done suspicious link acquisition or paid links in the past, start cleaning up your profile to make it look much more natural before you accidentally trip the paid links spam filter.

There are some bloggers who link to everyone everywhere at anytime. They just love dishing out the link love! However, not all bloggers are living in the free love world. Since the advent of the nofollow tag - which was marketed to bloggers as a way to stop blog spam - bloggers have seemingly become much more stingy with when and where they dole out those links in their blog posts… and that is if they aren’t nofollowing them in the first place. And if they are PR-conscious - that’s PageRank, not public relations! - they tend to be even stingier, under the impression that their PageRank will be better if they hoard it all to themselves.

But there are benefits of actively linking to other sites and blogs from within your own content.

More value to your readers
If you can provide useful links or additional commentary of your blog topic du jour, your blog has just become that more useful to your readers. If they are just going to go and Google your topic to find out more, instead of staying on your blog, why not just link to other sites in the first place? Then you also have the added bonus of choosing where your readers go off to read more next, instead of letting Google pick the sites.

Networking
With the great dashboard implementation in Wordpress, if you link to another blogger, they will know it… even if they never look at their blog stats. If they aren’t familiar with your blog, chances are pretty good that they will click the link to check you out and see what you wrote about them. And if they like your blog well enough, you have just got yourself a new subscriber by the mere act of linking to another blogger’s post from your own entry.

Sharing link love
If that blogger you linked to likes your stuff, chances are good that if they aren’t adding you to their blog roll, that they just might follow your stuff for the opportunity to link back to you one day. So that single outgoing link in your blog post can easily result in another link back to your own blog.

Promoting smart anchor text
Try and avoid linking with “here”, although sometimes that is what will happen so it doesn’t seem out of place or interrupt continuity in a blog entry. But do your best to link with the blog entry name or the blog name if possible. This will help those you link to, but also encourage others to link that way as well, and hopefully a few of those will be in links back to you!

Linking to Authority vs. non-authority
If you are blogging about Chevy trucks, you should link to Chevrolet’s official site, which definitely falls under the category of an authority outgoing link. But you might also want to link to your local Chevy dealership (which I would here, if they actually had a website I could find in Google!), which could be considered non-authority. I try to link to authority websites as well as some non-authority, but just do a check to make sure that non-authority site isn’t also lurking in a bad neighborhood! (Not sure what makes a link or site be in a bad neighborhood? Read Revisiting your linking strategies for a health check). There are also SEO benefits to linking out to authority sites, so definitely include them in your links.

Great for writer’s block
Stuck for a few days with nothing to write about? Do an entry where you link out to favorite blog posts you have read in the past week or two. But instead of doing snippets from the blog you link to, provide the link and your own blurb about each, such as why you think people should read it or something useful you got out of it. This will help differentiate these kind of posts from the usual “links of the day/week” that many bloggers are fond of.

Avoid the nofollow
Unless you are linking to someone with nofollow for a specific reason (which can be anything from being in a bad neighborhood, or you just don’t personally like the blogger!) dole out straight non-obfuscated links in your blog posts. If you link to a blog with a nofollow, trust me, they will notice and chances are pretty good they will either not link to you at all, or you can guarantee if they do, it will definitely be nofollowed back. There are far more benefits for you if you actively link out with straight links.

These obviously aren’t the only reasons why linking out is good But definitely some food for thought if you are one of those bloggers who rarely links out because you don’t want to share the link love!

Sometimes it is nice not to have to rely on Google AdSense or various CPM, CPA or CPC networks to generate revenue for your blog or website. And it is even nicer when you can supplement that income with additional revenue generated from direct buy advertisers, meaning they are advertisers that want to advertise directly on your blog without having to go through a middle man - meaning the advertiser gets more bang for their buck and you get the entire advertiser’s ad spend for your site without having to share it with a third party who takes a cut of your profits.

When you reach a certain level of traffic and repeat visitors, especially if you are well known as an authority in your space, it is often more profitable for you to solicit advertising directly, as opposed to using a third party such as AdSense or a CPM network for your advertising. What is the certain level? It will vary depending on your niche or market area, but if you are one of the top blogs or websites in that area, you can likely command the money to make it worth the effort of doing it.

Many people don’t want to deal with the added workload it takes to sell advertising directly, when they might only make an extra hundred dollars a month, but when you could be bringing in an extra ten, twenty or thirty thousand a month, usually the annoyance of the bit of extra work isn’t as much of a concern.

So now that you’ve decided to make the jump and accept direct buy advertisers, here is how you should do it to ensure that you aren’t leaving any money on the table and are making the process as user friendly for those advertisers as possible. Keep reading…

We can all admit (at least to ourselves, if you aren’t willing to admit it to others!) times when we were new to the whole SEO thing and we made a typical newbie SEO error. But some of those mistakes, even if they weren’t considered mistakes at the time you did them, can live on forever on your websites. Because let’s face it, when was the last time you went over your older site with a finetooth comb? Unless it happens to be under 20 pages, probably not since the day you created it. And sometimes what should be obvious, such as the title tags on all 2,000 pages of your site being the identical “YourSite.com - Insert Your Fancy Slogan Here” (whether a deliberate 1999 error or a website auto-update gone horribly wrong) to the 100 extra linked keywords you creatively placed below the copyright notice on a page you were trying to get ranked higher three years ago, can simply go unnoticed and forgotten about…. well, forgotten about by everyone except the search engine’s algorythms.

And your linking strategies definitely fall into this category. When was the last time you looked over your outbound links or had a better look at your inbound links other than the quick number check doing link: and the quick skimming of the first few listed links? I would hazard a guess it has probably been a while, and you are overdue for a link health check.

Here are some things to consider and look for as you evaluate the linking strategies on your sites and see how well they are working for you.

Visit all your outbounds.
First and for most, go through your site and click all the links. No, I am not talking about sending a link walker through your site to see what pops up with a 404, although it is fine to use that as a preliminary check to remove any dead links you have on your site (Xenu is one of the popular tools to do this, although there are many more out there now). But what you need to do is actually point and click through each and every external link on your site.

Why? You want to make sure you aren’t linking to any “bad neighborhoods”. This could be anything such as a site that hasn’t really changed much in the four years you’ve linked to it, but now you can identify it as being something less-than-worthy, whether it be a FFA page or a bunch of scraped content. Or perhaps the webmaster of a site you linked to decided it was more worthy of an arbitrage site, and changed it to something with three large AdSense blocks and requiring three taps on the page down button before you even see some semblance of content, original or um, borrowed. More on What exactly qualifies as a quality link.

You also want to make sure that none of the websites you linked to have let their domain name drop and it has been picked up by domain parkers, or worse, turned into a porn site. It isn’t good for business when you send your site targeting seniors looking for travel information to a site that has since turned into a hardcore alternative sex site! It definitely isn’t good for business.

NoFollow anyone?
Do any of your outbound links need to have a rel=nofollow added? You might link to a site that is a pretty iffy site, however still could be of some use for your visitors. So instead of removing the link altogether, simply no follow it.

Link bait
Ah, good old link bait. Fortunately, gone are the days when everyone tried to spin everything as something that could get Dugg or Slashdotted for both the monumental traffic and the links that would inevitably follow as people discussed the topic on their own blogs. More on link bait at Is link bait dying as a search engine optimization technique. Fortunately, it isn’t nearly as prolific or annoying as it was when I originally wrote that article. But with so many people doing it, it is definitely a diluted technique. Just watch how quickly the front of Digg moves… blink and you miss it, which means many people who might have found your blog post on Digg and blogged about it might not even see it. Bring on Link Bait V2.0, although I know some will argue it is here and being used already

Link exchanges
If you participated in any link exchanges over the years, make sure the return link still exisits. Some webmasters are notorious for leaving a link on for a few weeks, then removing it, assuming (correctly, in nearly all cases) that the webmaster wouldn’t ever make a return appearance to check and make sure the link is still there. There are certainly less devious reasons there might not be a link back to your site anymore, such as a website was sold to a new owner or the domain was snatched up by a domain speculator when it was dropped.

Another thing to look for is whether or not it seems the site is passing link juice. In other words, a site might have a perfectly fine link to your site, but it won’t help your site at all in terms of a boost in the rankings.

And lastly, avoid using the words “link exchange” or URLs with “links.html” in it. And avoid soliciting on your site for “link exchange partners”, there are many ways to creatively say this without using those words.

Did you get nofollowed?
Obviously, no one likes a nofollow tag on their link. So how can you handle this? There are a few ways. The first is to simply pop a rel=nofollow on the link back to their site. Effective, but doesn’t really help your own site’s rankings. You can also ask the webmaster about it, although depending on your site’s topic area, he or she might be more or less willing to remove the tag. Or, if the nofollow tag is removed, do watch incase it makes a return appearance in the coming weeks.

Cross linking
Are you cross linking your sites? If so, make sure that it isn’t too obvious. Obvious would be linking all 8 of your sites to each of the other sites, and then placing those links on every single page of each site. One or two links on a site is fine, and place the links where it makes logical sense, such as an article related to the theme of another site. You should also check to make sure all of those sites aren’t sitting on the same IP, something that was definitely more common several years ago and something that many hosts still do by default (GoDaddy is well known for hosting thousands of websites, even tens of thousands, on a single IP). And also make sure those cross-links aren’t the only links coming into the site.

What is the anchor text?
Have a look at the anchor text for both internal and external links and see if you can clean any of them up. More on Choosing your anchor text for incoming links.

Linking images
Don’t forget that when you link to a page with images, to be sure you include an alt tag (alt=) in the linking code. And this would definitely include any logo you have linking to your home page.

Buying links
I won’t get into the whole “Google said, webmasters said” thing here. I am sure you all know where to go to find the opposing sides in this battle! But if you are buying links, you do need to keep a few things in mind. First, buy links well under the radar. This means you will probably have to go alternate routes than buying through the mainstream brokers. Second is the disclaimer, there is the possibility you might find your site losing rankings in Google because you are buying or selling paid links. Many webmasters state they don’t care that Google is threatening to remove sites buying links, however at the end of the day, it is your site, and it is up to you how close to (or over) the line you wish to go when it comes to paid links. If your livelihood would crumble if Google banned the site you are considering buying links for, then tread very carefully or have a good backup plan in place.

Selling links
Again, read above. Selling links is usually much more obvious, so it is harder to stay under the radar on this one. If you do decide you have to sell links, then avoid the most obvious placements of footer links and navigation links, and only sell to those sites that are in your market area. Having a website that cater’s to a woman’s shoe fetish with footer links to viagra, poker, texas holdem, credit cards, loans and online pharmacy. Okay, at a stretch you could say that credit cards and loans are targeted to women who need to finance their need to be the next Imelda Marcos, but all those links together in a known spam placement sends up plenty of red flags.

www versus the non-www version
The age-old question, should you leave the www or remove it? The simple answer for an exisiting site is to select which version ranks best, as well as which has the greater number or most valuable incoming links. Then choose that as your default. And then make sure you use it yourself, and check the incoming links you can change to ensure you are helping the cause too. You can also select your choice in Google Webmaster Central, effectively telling Google which one you prefer.

While these are not the only things you should look at when checking your links, it is a definite good starting place for evaluating and checking your linking status. Anything else you would suggest?

It would be pretty nice if we could just select our top chosen keyword phrase as our anchor text and then use it for all incoming links we gather for our website. Unfortunately, it isn’t year 2000, and this technique just doesn’t hold the weight it once did, not to mention the fact that you very likely have more than one keyword phrase you want to rank well for.

So this brings us to the question of not only how to choose anchor text for brand new incoming links, but to also use anchor text in a way to make your backlinks look as natural as possible (even if they aren’t!) to the Google (and other search engine) powers-that-be. Here are some tips when it comes to selecting that crucial anchor text as well as things to consider once you start gathering (or buying) backlinks.

Keep reading…

We have all heard everyone say that quality inbound links are crucial to any search engine optimization campaign. But that said, what exactly qualifies as a quality link? Is it just a link from a PR6 site or higher? Is it a link from a site that ranks for your chosen keywords? Is it a site that sells links through a text link broker? You would probably be surprised that the answer can be yes or no, but it is up to you to identify what makes a quality link and one makes a link you’d be better off passing on.

There are many factors that can go into identifying what makes a quality link from a site. Let’s look at some of the things that makes a link a quality link and how to know if there are potential buyer-beware issues for each.

Keep reading…

Whether you love it or hate it, link bait has been going strong for about a year now, with webmasters and bloggers carefully crafting titles and articles for the maximum amount of link baiting goodness. But like all SEO techniques that webmasters run wild with until it is done to death, is link bait due to be exterminated as a usable technique?

Keep reading…