A “natural” link profile is crucial to your rankings

A “natural” link profile is crucial to your rankings

A natural link profile is attained by managing your website’s incoming link portfolio – managing links TO your website from external resources.

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Linking considerations

Excessive use of keyword-rich Anchor Text in backlinks can be severely penalised. Especially if it’s not matched with multiple iterations of the Brand / Business Name and bland occurrences of “website” and sundry innocuous anchor texts. There was a time in competitive niche markets when it was difficult to rank for a keyword search phrase that was NOT included in the link titles (anchor text) in links to your website. I’m a specialist SEO consultant, and all our website redesign projects include an SEO assessment via an audit.

That’s all been changed since 2012, as Google began targeting and destroying the effectiveness of various link-building schemes.

Your link-building processes may have included the implementation of a blog, publishing authoritative articles and social bookmarking optimisation, social site networking and press release submissions.

There is a great deal of controversy and misinformation over link building, particularly in light of Google’s efforts to stamp out;

  • Link rings, free-for-all and spam link schemes
  • Paid text links based on page rank
  • Anything designed to subvert search engine indexes

Good citations and links come from;

  • sites in the same genre as yours – i.e. similar or related businesses
  • web directories such as Yahoo, Open Directory etc

One-way backlinks from trusted websites are still good. Links come from a broad range of widely distributed geographic locations, never a bad thing. As part of our SEO project work, we offer a range of link audit and remedial works;

Link Profile Audits: Manual review of your inbound link profile and assessing if there are sufficient bad links to receive a Google Penguin penalty. We access Google and Bing Webmaster Tools data, plus do additional online research using our own software tools.

The toxic links we look for are;

  • Low-quality Web Directories
  • Low-quality Social Bookmarking sites
  • Blog and forum signature links
  • Article Directory & Press Release links
  • Over-optimised Anchor Texts
  • Deep links to internal pages
  • Missing Brand / Business name in link titles

All of that will give us a good picture of how Google and Bing are likely to interpret your online reputation and link-building practices. Good links have a predominance of link titles/anchor text to;

  • The Domain name and Domain URL
  • Brand name/business name
  • Words like; click here, website, visit us etc
  • Very few internal Page URLs
  • Almost NO exact-match high-volume keywords in Link Titles

The closer your link profile is to the “norm” for your genre of site, the better off you will be. A single good link truly is worth 1,000 mediocre links!

Contact us for Website SEO audit services

Page last Updated on 23rd October 2023 by the author Ben Kemp