Natural Link Building

A webmaster or blogger produced good content or blog post, and naturally acquired numerous link back from other webmasters (from their website contents) or bloggers (from their blog articles). There is no monetary transaction involved during the acquisition of the inbound links (backlinks). The exact web pages that the backlinks pointing from and the anchor text of the backlinks are often unpredictable by the blogger who produced the good content.

Unnatural Link Building

Unnatural links can be created by purchasing of inbound links from websites (or web pages) of other webmasters for the purpose of improving rankings in the SERP. Usually webmasters (or SEO link developers) buy backlinks from web pages that have high Google PageRank. Also, the anchor text of the inbound links are often pre-determined by both parties.

Some webmasters argue that unnatural links purchased are for the purpose of increasing traffic to the purchaser website. The traffic may drive sales or improve brand awareness.

However, Google is against the buying of inbound links as explained by Matt Cutts and is encouraging webmaster to report the purchase of paid links.

Reciprocal Link Exchange

Reciprocal link exchange occurs when two websites point links to one another, hoping to improve one another’s rankings in the SERP.

Due to the spammy and easy-to-manipulate nature of two-way reciprocal linking, Google has reduced the positive effects of reciprocal links to both webmaster parties who have involved. Many webmasters have shifted intention to rather exchange qualified traffic.

Linkbait

One way natural inbound link building is self-explanatory and is one of the most important SEO techniques in improving rankings on search engine result pages (SERP). Linkbait is a deliberate method in acquiring backlinks. It is considered a subset of one-way natural inbound link building in which some bloggers (or webmasters or SEO experts) deliberately write very interesting or very debatable blog posts. The topics can be discussions about daily issues (or news) or even go as far as to spread negative news about their competitors. The reward of this is high number of blog comments and natural back links.

One of the ways to make the most out of the linkbait technique is to use Digg. Linkbait via Digg is also known as Digg-bait. Some bloggers (or webmasters or SEO experts) deliberately write blog posts (or articles) with very interesting or very debatable and submit them to Digg. Due to the high traffic nature of Digg, some blog posts got Dugg by many Digg audiences. The more times your article (or web page) got Dugg, the higher it is being ranked on Digg. Some of these Diggers (or readers) are actually also bloggers who point links to these highly debatable articles from their blogs.

For example, a flight reservation site is highly benefited from a backlink pointing from a related industry sites such as a site providing information about popular holiday travel destinations and vacation packages. On the other hand, an inbound link pointing from a website providing information on web hosting services will benefit the flight reservation site very little.

Industry relevancy is also about the content on your own site. The webmaster who owns the flight reservation website will want to create some sort of resource directories from within his site. In this case, the content related to travel, tourism, vacation packages, car rental and popular destinations can be created.

Industry relevancy does not only apply to the entire site, but is also applicable to the web pages of a website. When you are finding sites to build inbound links from, you often may come across large websites that have numerous categories. The right thing is do is to get a backlink from a category that can match your own industry.

Search engines do use the Applied Semantics algorithm when determining the industry relevance of a web page within a site. Applied Semantics algorithm looks at different keywords on a web page when determining the industry segment of each web page.

Therefore, to get the full benefit of the link value the above webmaster should try his very best to get a backlink from the most relevant page within the related category.

You may want to review a list of SEO link building check points, before rushing into link building for your sites.

1. How many outgoing links are on the linking page?
2. What is the PageRank value on the link page?
3. Are the pages indexed in the search engines?
4. What will be the anchor text of the link?
5. Are there nofollow tags within the HTML or in the Robots.txt file?
6. Is the site industry relevant to yours?
7. Is the linking page industry relevant to yours?
8. How deep down the directory structure will the link be within the site?
9. Is the link page dynamically generated?
10. Is the linking page embedded on a framed site?
11. Is the link being redirected to another page before reaching your site?
12. Is the link from a Javascript navigation?

Just less than 48 hours ago, the directory has started to accept new site submissions again, though the new editor applications are still not available. If you have your website ready, now it is a good time to submit to Dmoz. Due to a software failure during an upgrade in October 2006, the entire submission queue of sites being submitted to Dmoz has been lost.

It is certainly great news for the Open Directory Project to eventually be operational, I would still ask the following questions.

• Will Dmoz’s authority values from the major search engines keep on dropping?
• With all the new faces such as YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Techcrunch, MyBlogLog, and Flicker, emerging from the Web 2.0 era, will Dmoz be able to compete?
• Will there be a major change to the Open Directory Project made by its new owner AOL to revive the already declining directory?

From the above screenshot it may look like Dmoz has been back to action since 18 December 2006, but the truth is that only since less than 48 hours ago, its site submission function has been becoming operational. If you are interested, you can find out more information and history about the Open Directory Project on this Wikipedia article.

Effect #1 Bad outbound links can hurt your search engine rankings

Having many outbound links pointing to external websites can hurt your search engine rankings, when those external websites are considered spammy by search engines. Websites you should not link to include link farms or automated linking systems that produce no value to the world wide world. However, Google mentioned it rather looks for bad outbound linking patterns,

Be assured that we’re not looking to penalize folks for a ‘bad’ link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of ‘egregious’ linking behavior… both on individual sites and in the aggregate.

Actively checking out the quality of an external website is recommended before pointing a link to it. However, a website with good content often has outbound links to external contents that can cross-reference its own content.

Also, Google warned that it is important to ensure the outbound links are working fine.

It’s certainly in your users’ interest that you regularly audit outgoing links on your site (especially prominent ones) to ensure that you’re not losing folks’ trust by sending them to inappropriate places or 404 pages.

Effect #2 Good outbound links can provide good user experience

Normally, no matter how comprehensive your website is on a topic, it cannot contain every little single detail. From a visitor perspective, it is always a help when a website has outbound links within its content pointing to external contents that are of complementary values.

Also, having outbound links on your website, it shows to the visitors that the content on your website can be trusted.

Effect #3 Only when you give, you will receive

Everyone understands if you don’t give you don’t get either. By offering links to other websites with similar theme to yours, you will often receive inbound links in return.

Also, offering links to other websites can often bring your own website returned visitors. Here is what Google said about this one,

Sure, it’s great to keep Google happy, but it’s usually more important (long term) to have your users be return visitors.

Conclusion

It will not stop visitors from leaving your websites by hiding or having no outbound links. If your visitors cannot find what they need on your website, they will simply go back to the search engines.

Finally, it is a good habit for all webmasters to keep up-to-date with the latest changes by visiting the Google Webmaster Central Blog on a regular basis.