Posts Tagged ‘natural links’
Changes in Natural Linking - Death, Rebirth, or a Return to the Roots?
When contemplating link-building strategies you need to take the user experience into account. They should look at your citations (links) as references to substantiating or relevant documents. Search engines will use these signals to define your site. Consider the user experience when focusing on building contextually relevant links for your business, and you will be rewarded with higher amounts of relevant direct referrals and relevant search engine placement.
There’s been some excellent articles recently focused on this issue, including changes in natural linking by Eric Enge, Editorial Citation by Rand Fishkin and natural link building strategies by Michael Gray.
Michael’s analysis was interesting in that he took Google’s guidelines at face value, created great content, and spent only 10% of his time building links manually. After six months of blogging, Google represented just over 0.5% of his referral traffic. That’s a pathetic amount, considering how popular the posts were in StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social networks. In fact, when he analyzed his traffic, he discovered that the blog didn’t perform in the top 100 for even the simplest keywords. The exception was one post for which Michael did a little link building. Apart from this limited effort, certain posts which received over 30,000 views from social marketing generated almost no natural inbound links.
Now, Michael isn’t advocating that content doesn’t matter. It does, as it engages readers and entices them to return. His article restates a point everyone in the industry has been making for years: If you build it, they don’t just come, or in this case, the links don’t just happen, and the engines won’t just refer anyone your way. As Ian Lurie wrote: “content alone is not going to boost you into the top 10 for any even remotely relevant phrase”
Of particular interest to me in juxtaposition to the pieces by Ian and Michael were the articles by Eric Enge and Rand Fishkin. Rand hypothesizes that 20% of the web’s links exist to influence the search engines. That’s a lot of noise, but that also means 80% are not there just to influence search engines. Eric makes the point that 80% leaves lots of meat to work with and links are still a big factor, but he also estimates that you need to spend 30% of marketing energy into social media, which is interesting in the context of Michael’s lack of success with organic link building from social networks.
There’s an interesting question in Eric’s article, which every site operator should ask themselves: “If you aren’t good enough to be worth linking to, then what do you have anyway?” The answer is of course, you need to build better content. But, a hint to the broader correct answer can actually be found in the title of Rand’s article: Editorial Citation.
Rand notes this in his reference to three periods of linking: 1) early web; links were editorial like footnotes and citations, helping people navigate the web; 2) The engines incorporate web page links as a value metric in ranking algorithms (Google / Alltheweb/ Teoma); 3) non-webpage citations. Google’s recent patent publication which was reviewed by Eric Ward, supports this last point - see Eric’s point #5.
However, another point in the patent leads us in towards additional context: user interaction with links may determine their value, and may go a long way to resolving the dichotomy between the points these articles circle, but also may point search marketers towards clues around link building strategies going forward.
Links from different areas of the document will have different value, and will pass different amounts of link juice flow. Obviously, a link from one site to the next where the link is located in the main body content and is relevant to both the origin and destination will end up scoring higher than an irrelevant link, or links within footers, template side navs and the like. Which really is the point: links as citations are the oldest form of linking, and still carry the most value.