How To Build A Natural Backlink Profile
A natural backlink profile consists of earned, organic links with no paid or manipulative tactics, aligned with Google’s quality guidelines.
How To Build A Natural Backlink Profile
A natural backlink profile in SEO is when all of your website’s backlinks consist of earned, organic links, and there are no signs of paid placements or manipulative tactics. When evaluating a “natural” link profile, Google looks for links:
- With diverse texts
- On authoritative and relevant sites
- That have been built over time (and not hundreds at once)
Google favors natural backlink profiles as they indicate trustworthy, authoritative, high-quality content. A natural backlink profile helps to future-proof your SEO and keep you in Google’s good graces. Especially when you can be penalized with a manual action for paying for links or building hundreds of spammy ones, you want to stay on Google’s good side.
Backlinks
Backlinks are a part of SEO as a way to build trust and authority for your domain, but not as important as link builders claim.
A healthy backlink appears to be natural.
Ranking a website without backlinks
It includes a focus on the audience and having them create brand demand, which can be equal in weight to backlinks but drives more customers. Once you drive demand and create solid resources, backlinks start occurring naturally. And when you have an active audience built from other channels, you can survey them to create “link-worthy” pages that can result in journalists reaching out. Having said that, when everything else is equal, the authority and trust that come with a strong, natural backlink profile can determine who receives the most traffic and who does not.
Search engines, including Google, expect a certain amount of spammy links from directories, website monitoring tools, and even competitors that spam or try to do a negative SEO attack.
Healthy link profiles contain a mix of dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, and mentions from actual users in forums, communities, and social media shares.
What is unnatural
Having backlinks for no reason would likely be considered an unhealthy link profile, especially if they’re mostly dofollow.
There would be no incentive for someone to connect to you if you had nothing significant, no original research or thought leadership, or something that went viral and was covered by the media.
Unhealthy backlink profiles are where a website has links from topically irrelevant websites, when the articles have mentions of big brands and “trustworthy” or “high authority” sites, and then randomly feature a smaller company or service provider with them.
Scholarship, Grants, and Sponsorships
Scholarship and grant programs are a proven strategy to attract high-authority .edu backlinks. Adding scholarships, it usually comes with a backlink from a trusted .edu domain, one of the most powerful links you can earn. For example, the HubSpot Marketing Scholarship initiative not only supported students but also earned HubSpot hundreds of .edu backlinks from colleges referencing the program.
Citations and Broken Links
Building a natural backlink profile is an approach to develop a natural connection when you are mentioned in the media or when a competitor’s naturally occurring link to a study leads to a broken page. Ask these websites to provide a link to your research instead.
Topically Relevant PR
Digital PR combines traditional public relations strategies with modern digital marketing techniques to increase online visibility, improve brand reputation, and acquire natural backlinks. Unlike more mechanical link-building methods, Digital PR focuses on creating newsworthy content that journalists, bloggers, and industry influencers naturally want to reference and link to.
Blog and Forum Commenting
If your customers are on the blog or in the community, join the community and participate. Use it to acquire an audience and build trust for your brand. The backlinks and community mentions will eventually happen. And this is how they can become natural.
Social Media Profile Links
Social media is about building an audience and bringing them to your website. The backlinks are useless for SEO, with one exception. Some search engines crawl and index accounts. Suppose you struggle to get crawled, an active social media account that gets crawled and indexed fast may be able to encourage spiders to find your website and pages more easily.
Focus on Being Worth Linking To
Backlinks can be obtained in a variety of ways, but not all of them are of quality. It won’t help you with SEO if the link can be bought or obtained by anybody, such as a directory.
The backlink will likely work against you if most of the website isn’t topically relevant to you and your customers aren’t on it.
Good and bad, natural and artificial, are mixed in healthy link profiles. There won’t be any backlinks that would help you succeed in the long run if your business hasn’t done or shared anything link-worthy.
