I don’t personally believe there is such a thing as natural link building, as soon as you take action with the intent of creating links everything is unnatural. I guess the only natural ways to get links are when your completing a task regardless of SEO or links. I think SEO’s should be thinking more down the lines of clever, relevant and innovative link building, natural at least in most industries doesn’t really exist.

Cheers

It is really hard to see what constitutes natural link building, and what doesn’t. I think the simple solution is just to avoid spamming websites, or using black-hat tactics to build links.

Great post. I have been trying to read more about natural link building in order to help some of my clients.

I guess the post was aimed at those people who say “you don’t need to build links just content” , my argument was and is that you have to build links in order to make your content linkable. The only natural link that exists is one that has not been initiated by the webmaster acquiring the link, however using this method (build the content and they will come) is never going to work on it’s own and everyone needs a link building strategy.

As far as building natural links, yes, the best thing to do is get links, in content from relevant blogs and resources, however placing links on old pages in content is never going to work, the posts have to be fresh in order for links to pass the weight you need.

You make a very valid point, ‘what is natural about adding your link to a huge (mostly) irrelevant list of links?’ I would say that us link builders need to be far more creative with our link building so as these ‘other’ links (we build) are far more natural than most of them generally look. Articles written on related blogs and websites are very natural looking and not at all out of place if the blog is from the same theme as the article, don’t you think? Also ‘in context’ links can be perfect on websites that relate to the theme, themed links if you like.
As a long time suffering link builder I have found new ideas and creative ways of making these ‘other’ links look more natural. It’s also worth remembering the old adage ‘quality is better than quantity’ pointing us link builders to getting say 10 quality links which look natural rather than 1000′s of spam blog posts or unrelated directory links. There are many ways to build links in a more natural way, although they are not natural links as it is I who build them. Isn’t this where you begin distinguish between good and bad linking practices and techniques?
Social book marking I always consider being more about getting your websites direct hits (new visitors) and these days it is quite natural for people to bookmark all sorts of unrelated and e relevant stuff.
I do realise that even the best built links (to us seo experts) still look obviously unnatural to some extent but is this just because we’ve been in the business too long Tim ?

I think good content is obviously the way to get ‘natural’ links however in order to get people to see it you need to build not so natural links, ie article marketing, directories and even social bookmarking, I mean what is natural about adding your link to a huge (mostly) irrelevant list of links.

Ask any SEO agency and they will tell you there is need for these unnatural or manual sorts of links, however they will all agree that natural link building is the hardest thing to accomplish ie, natural mentions, viral markeal marketing and content syndication.

Thanks for the comment and link

I think the rate at which you build links depends solely on the size of your link profile, sites with thousands of links do tend to generate a lot of links anyway so a 100 growth a day isn’t so bad, however if you have a brand new site I think any more than 300 – 400 a month is probably too much and it is important to keep you anchor text natural.