Links to category pages unnatural?

[inhouseseo]

If people are linking to your site, it would seem natural that the vast majority of those links would point to the homepage, product page, or a article/content page.

Let's say you have 100 links pointing to your site, and 40 of them are pointing to category pages. Would this seem unnatural?

Does Google or other search engines have a way of determining this as a factor in ascertaining whether the links are natural or not?

Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the pages that are linked to on your site?

[ofw12387]

From 100 links, 40 pointing categories looks ok for me.

Google is against link building practices and follows such practice ( PENGUIN ), so if you want to do link building and not get caught, you need to build a very natural link profile:

- Anchors: Do not use the exacly keyword you want to rank as anchor, instead use long sentences including your kw.
- Variety: Do not get just "keyword" links, links with url, branch are also important.
- Nofollow: It´s very important to include nofollow links in your link profile.
- **Footer/sidebar: **Avoid links from footer/sidebar, specially if they are nofollow.
- **Variety of domains: **Get your links from different domains.
- Avoid links fromk penalized websites: It´s also very important to analyze the domains your site is going to be linked are healthy enough.

Fore more complete information, checkout this article: http://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building

[Dezzign]

It doesn't really matter which pages of your site have links going to them, including category pages. There's a few things to watch out for regarding unnatural inbound links and they're listed below in order of priority, however any of the below points will cause you issues if you abuse them.

• The main one to watch out for is an over optimized anchor text profile.
• The second thing to watch is the type of inbound links you have. Are they all the same type of links such as directory links or blog comments etc.
• The third thing to watch out for is your inbound link velocity. Is that category page getting new inbound links at 5 x the velocity of everyone else's sites in your niche.

If all your links are from diverse and (reasonably) reputable sources, and your inbound anchor text profile isn't over optimized, then you could have hundreds of links pointing to your category pages without an issue. If a big brand suddenly released a whole new range of merchandise then their category page/s would acquire 1000's of links without an issue.

Feel free to build links to any page you want to rank, just make sure they're good links. I also hope that your category page has it's onsite Seo is up to scratch. Having all of your meta data, heading tags, and content up to scratch will go a long way and it'll help you to get the most power out of your inbound links too. Hope this helps a little.