Natural Link Profile - Ranking Signal?
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Hi,
Is a natural link profile a ranking signal? What is the value in a natural link profile?
What is a (natural?) link graph? Is Majestic SEO the only company capable of visualizing a link graph?
(I know the answers to these questions but I want to hear what SEOMoz has to say in the quasi-official standards of SEOMoz Q/A)
Regards,
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I think that Daniel and Gianluca are on track here, but I just wanted to try to structure it a bit. Google has over 200 ranking factors now, and we use "natural" link profile to cover a pretty big chunk of them. Generally, I think natural means:
(1) From a diversity of sources (blogs, forums, PR, etc.)
(2) Using a diversity of tactics (comments, contextual links, etc.)
(3) Having a diversity of anchor text, including keyword-targeted and brand-targeted. This is probably one of the easier cues for "unnatural" links. If you're SEO'ing for "medium blue widgets" and 99% of your anchor text is "medium blue widgets", it's not natural.
(4) From topically relevant sites. This is a nice-to-have, but it's not clear how well Google can measure relevance. General authority and "trust" may be more important, although I think relevance will matter more over time.
(5) Not from paid sources. Technically, ads should be nofollow'ed, and some paid placements are a lot easier to spot. If you're right under a "Sponsors" banner, in a box with 10 links from wildly irrelevant and disconnected sites, or in a sitewide footer, your link is going to look unnatural).
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Errata corrige: the link to OpenSiteExplorer I gave is wrong. Here it is http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
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Ciao
If you mean as natural link profile an X number of links which have different anchor text (and sometimes that means the Brand name and/or the URL as anchor), from different kind of websites and with a certain % also of nofollowed link... well, it is not properly a ranking signal, but the metrics of those links surely are.
Majestic SEO is a wonderful tool, but being a PRO member you can use http://www.opensitexplorer.com
It is based on Linkscape and it offers you a very strong portrait of your (and your competitors) link profile and from some hints Rand gave in several posts, it is going to be revamped in the next months.
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Is a natural link profile a ranking signal? No. You don't get better rankings because your link profile looks "more natural" than another website. It's more of a spam signal. If your link profile looks unnatural, you could get penalized. But there's no scale for being more or less natural, there's just natural or unnatural.
A natural link profile has a variety of backlinks. Those links come from a variety of sources. Those links have varied anchor texts. Those links have varied placements on the different pages. Those links are pointing to a variety of your internal pages. The links come from different types of websites.
As far as showing link totals and growth in a graph, Majestic SEO is great, but it's easy to do yourself in Excel. I do it that way because Majestic goes back 4 or 5 years and sometimes I'm more interested in just seeing progress over the last few months.
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