So what exactly does Google consider a "natural" link profile?

[DeannaTallman]

As part of my company's ongoing SEO effort we have been analyzing our link profile. A colleague of mine feels that we should be targeting at least 50% branded anchor text. He claims this is what search engines consider "natural" and we should not go past a threshold of 50% optimized anchor text to make sure we avoid any penalties or decrease in rankings.

50% brand term anchor text seems too high to me. I pointed out that most of our competitors who outrank us have a much greater percentage of optimized links. I've also read other industry experts state that somewhere in the range of 30% branded anchor text would be considered natural.

What percent of branded vs. optimized anchor text do you feel looks "natural" and what do you base your opinion on?

[DROIDSTERS]

I would also add the importance of no-followed links. Based of what I've seen around a percentage between 2% and 10% of no followed links makes your website "natural".

Moreover, I'd mention the importance of the proportion of internal and external links. Again, based on my experience (not official and tested data) a natural proportion would be around: 7%-25% external and rest internal.

We could make an important distinction: are we talking about "root domain", "sub-domain" or "page level"? The proportion of the link ingredients is different for each of them...

[PaulRogers]

A natural link profile will feature a diverse range of different links from a number of different types of websites. In terms of anchor text ratio, I would recommend looking at the ratio for your top 10 competitors for your primary target term, adding them all together and dividing them by 10 to get a benchmark figure for brand vs anchor text link. I would recommend building relationships with bloggers in your industry, creating link worthy content via social media and your blog and also looking at a few good directories for a start to build diversity into your activity.