Organic Link Building Revealed

Issue #3: Grow Your Links At The Right Pace And Google Will Naturally Fall In Love With Your Site

Hello there! I hope you are doing good and proactively applying the principles of organic link building every day. Today we're gonna talk about what natural link growth is and what it means to your site. Ready? Then let's get straight to it.

In Today's Issue:

***Growing Your Links At A Natural Speed***
***Use PageRank Information — And Use It Wisely***
***Remember To Get Your Incoming Links From Various Locations***

Growing Your Links At A Natural Speed

If you are running a commercial Website, one of your problems from an SEO perspective is that natural link growth is not likely to happen to you without some extra effort on your part. Unlike blogs, for example, commercial Websites really have to create content that inspires linking and develop inbound links (aka backlinks) proactively.

Since your site's link popularity depends on the quality as well as the number of backlinks, one of the typical mistakes Webmaster make is to rush and place hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your site overnight. Again, think natural link building. Can a site get thousands of backlinks overnight? No way. Will Google like it? Unless it's a super-trusted site such as the Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ), the answer is a resounding no.

Therefore, do NOT get hundreds of thousands links pointing to a new site right after the site appears online. If you do this, you are asking search engines for trouble. And trouble here means your site could easily be sandboxed, or even banned from Google. Dropped from the index. Ouch.

You need to increase the number of your backlinks gradually, depending on how many links your site is usually getting. This means if a site usually gets 10 new links a week, don't point 100 backlinks to it all of a sudden. Instead, increase the number of backlinks you get slowly but surely, by 5 or 15 links a week, for example. Schedule your link growth, and try to keep up with that schedule to stay in the clear and build your links the natural way.

Tracking your link growth could be a pain in the neck, especially if you have hundreds of them or if you are running multiple Websites. Not to worry — LinkAssistant makes this job a lot easier. LinkAssistant quickly tells you all you need to know about your backlinks, including but not limited to a backlink's creation date, its link popularities in major search engines, its Alexa Rank, its Google PageRank, and which site it's coming from. And, you can easily check if a link still exists, and add more links.

Use PageRank Information — And Use It Wisely

We all know what PageRank is. It's a patented method that Google uses to measure the relative importance of a page, on a scale of 0 to 10. Here's how Google describes it:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Now don't get carried away and make achieving a high PageRank the most important part of your linking strategy. PageRank is just one of the many factors Google takes into account when calculating the ranking for your Website. And it's not the most important one. Not by a long shot. So you should not be interested in PageRank per se, you should be interested in getting more targeted traffic, more visitors and more sales.

But, PageRank does have its uses in the organic link building context. Generally, you wanna make sure the PageRank pattern of your incoming links appears natural to Google. This means, the PageRank values of the sites that link to you should be different, since that's how it usually happens with the natural link growth scenario we are trying to reproduce.

For instance, if ten of your incoming links carry the PageRank of 5, six links have a PageRank of 4, and the remaining 50 have PageRanks of 0 to 3, this looks all natural and dandy. However, if all ten of your backlinks have the PageRank value of 5, odds are, your site will be penalized.

Why? Because this doesn't look natural to Google. What it does look like is that you simply went ahead and purchased ten high PageRank links pointing to your site. Even if you didn't, Google will still think you did and devalue them, so be warned.

You can use LinkAssistant to get a quick overview of the PageRank values your incoming links have, and adjust your linking strategy accordingly. My experience ahs been that for optimal results not more than 15-20% of your incoming links should have a PageRank of 5 and above. Feel free to use this tip as a rule of thumb when in doubt.

Remember To Get Your Incoming Links From Various Locations

Another factor to consider when evaluating the quality of your backlinks is where they come from on a specific page. Although not as important as other factors, the onpage location of your incoming links is also taken into account by the search engines when deciding how natural these links actually are.

With a natural link growth, people will put links to your site into different places no a page. This includes headers, footers, body text and navigation, for example.

Therefore, it's in your best interest to get incoming links from different locations too when exchanging links. While this could be tricky to implement in practice, at least make sure you don't get all your links from the same location such as a page footer. Such placement is typical for some link network services.

This is not to say you shouldn't do it, just remember such links will be of a lower value search engines-wise.

OK, let's call it a day for now. Hopefully you've learned some useful things in this issue that you can apply to your own site. As always, you can contact me directly at if you have any further questions.

If you missed the previous issue of Organic Link Building Revealed, you can grab it here. And look out for the next one entitled "Choosing Your Neighborhood Wisely, And Keeping Google Happy".

Best of luck optimizing your sites,
Dan Richmond
SEO Consultant
Link-Assistant.Com