Natural Link Profiles and Unnatural Link Profiles
With all the Google gizzard gazing in the SEO community over what is a natural link profile and what is an “unnatural” link profile, this might put things in some perspective as it is based on how link profiles grow as seen by a search engine operator.
Stage 0: Website launch
Minimal links – typically outbound links to analytics, the web hosting provider and the web developer. If it is a DIY site, there may be some “useful sites” links but these will be outbound links. A site can go for months or years before ever getting any inbound links.
Stage 1: Family and friends
The launch of a new website is quite commonplace now and some of the new inbound links will be from the sites owned by friends and family. This is often a very limited spike of new links and the sites are often in the same geographical areas.
Stage 2: Businesses and acquaintances
Businesses will often ignore other businesses in their niche but will link to non-competing businesses in their chamber of commerce or local business network. Shopping malls tend to have clusters of interlinked sites with the common factor often being the shopping mall’s main site. A typical link type to see at this stage is supplier/seller especially where there is a brand name involved. Often it is an outbound link from the new site to the national or regional brand name supplier. The brand name site may list the new site as their seller in a particular area.
Stage 3: Customers and blogs
This is a later stage where customers of the business may recommend the business’s website in forums or on blog discussions. These are deeper links than the relatively shallow links of stages 1 and 2. They are also transient in that they do not stay at the top level of the website for long and will move deeper into the site’s link structure over time. (Unmaintained blogs are red flags for potential link spam. If the comments are unmoderated all sorts of rubbish links (drugs/warez/porn) will appear rapidly and the blog will be blacklisted as a problem site.)
Stage 4: Directories and other resources
While directories used to be good resources, the improvement of search engines has changed the submission pattern. However some directories with a good exclusion policy (no spam) can be useful and the business website may be included either as a submission by the owner or by the directory operator adding content. Personal links (favourite sites/useful links) also appear around this stage.
Stage 5: Promotion
Good promotion tends to be highly targeted. Bad promotion is not. Sometimes new sites may use spam services to get links but in search engine terms this stands out because the links are frequently “out of area” links. A localised business targeting a particular geographical or business niche with non-relevant and or foreign country links (off topic/out of context links) tends to look strange. Comment spam also looks strange in links terms. A natural profile might have links based on the business owner’s interests and business. Comment spam tends to appear as a pile of one-way links with no common linkages for the blogs.
Natural link profiles tend to build gradually over time and may be somewhat spikey along the time axis. Promotion can show up as increased inbound links but there is a relationship between a site being a continually developed, interactive, non-brochureware site and a gradually increasing number of inbound links. A rapid increase in inbound links to a brochureware site with no interaction is a red flag. Promotional campaigns that run in parallel with launch tend to fade away over time.
The Irish search engine that I’ve been developing for the last few months is now getting close to launch. If anyone wants a look at the early beta index, then e-mail me ( jmcc at hosterstats .com). The set of sites in the Irish search engine index is fairly comprehensive so most of the links will be with in the larger set of pages from these sites. This makes it easier to see abnormal or unnatural link profiles by simply analysing the link profile for a site compared to the larger set of sites.