Exchanging Links the Natural Way
So what are "Natural Links"?
We've all seen them: really long pages that contain a bunch of links to other sites yet nothing of much value to a human reader. If you get your site placed on one, you might get 2 lines of text about your site and your link is surrounded by links to other sites that almost never have anything to do with the keywords you are trying to focus on. Does that look natural to you? Well it doesn't look natural to the Google either. Google also expects you and sites pointing to you to provide quality content on your website. Hundreds of links on a single page about topics that don't have anything to do with each other is not quality content. It's spam. And search engines can spot it, especially Google. What's more, most of these links are reciprocal - that is each site links to back to the site that links to it. While this is harder to spot with the human eye, it's not hard for Google to see this pattern. In fact it's down right easy. Yet how many webmasters do you know that take every single reciprocal link with any site that wants to trade - relevant or not. Excuse the grammar, but that ain't natural...
Wouldn't it be better if the page linking to you contained a short paragraph about you and your services or products? And wouldn't it be better if your paragraph were surrounded by other short paragraphs about the same topic as your website? All those relavent paragraphs together would look like an article to the the search engine spiders - they would eat it up. Google and the other major search engines love relevant content - articles are very valuable tools in increasing your link popularity. Google especially loves content that stays fresh with up to date information. Natural Link Exchange takes care of all of this for you - automatically.
What Natural Link Exchange Does
So we've learned that search engine spam does very little if anything for your rankings
and we've learned that spam is not all that hard to spot. We've also seen some of the
factors that Google uses to rank pages. Natural Link Exchange can help you in several ways.
Here are some of the attributes of the links you obtain by using Natural Link Exchange:
-
Your links will be placed on relevant pages on sites in the Natural Links Exchange
network with other relevant article paragraphs.
-
These link pages will include daily refreshed content that is relevant to the
topic of the link page - this will keep the search engine spiders coming back
and therefore following the link to your site. Since the page is fresh daily,
it adds more value to the link.
-
Reciprocal links will be formed where they make sense - that is between relevant sites.
-
One-way links will be formed from sites in related categories that are not directly relevant.
-
Relevancy is defined using the DMOZ directory so you can be sure Google and other
search engines find page relationships natural.
-
Links will be added slowly. You control the percentage of days (by month) that a
link is added to your site. You also control the number of links that are added on
those days. For example, you can configure Natural Link Exchange to add 1 link on
50% of the days of the month. Natural Link Exchange will then randomize this 50% so
links won't be added in a pattern like once every other day.
-
You create as many different "mini-articles" as you like (not free accounts). Then you indicate a
distribution percentage. This allows you to avoid duplicate content and allows you
to target a specific anchor text ratio.
-
You control the anchor text since you are writing the mini articles.
-
Natural Link Exchange pages link to other Natural Link Exchange pages therefore
adding additional pages of related content to your site.
-
All of these pages are based on a template you provide so they look like your pages.
-
All the link pages can be static HTML so they look natural
First and if nothing else, Natural Link Exchange saves you an enormous amount of time over gathering links, adding them to your pages and then requesting a reciprocal
link from another site.
As we discussed earlier, search engines love content and they seem to eat up articles.
Therefore Natural Links Exchange lets you create mini articles instead of just the standard
"anchor text: site description". Not only does this appear more natural, it also eliminates
the look of a standard links page - another potential footprint. This technique also allows
you to have more than one link back to your site inside your mini article. Your mini article
is placed on a page that has a title tag filled with the category of your mini article giving
your link more relevancy. Your mini articles are also grouped with other mini articles from
other sites in your category making the entire page look like a single article and giving
each mini article more relevancy on the same page.
Relevancy and fresh content are so important to making a link count, Natural Link Exchange
adds even more relevant content through syndicated content feeds. Each link pages contains
at least one RSS feed that is related to the category of that page. Because these RSS feeds
update their content so often, this links page should be visited more often which means these
links will also be visited more often. This is great for you in 2 ways. First because all the
links you have that are on other sites will cause the spiders to visit your site. Second because
since you also have a links page, it should contain a link back to your home page causing the
spiders to visit there too. Also remember that the Google patent considers links from a page
with fresh and relevant content to be more valuable than one from a site with no freshness.
The rate at which links are added is also important and may even have an impact on whether
or not a new site will get stuck in the Google sandbox. Natural Links Exchange allows you
to throttle the speed at which new links to your site are added - again making the new links
appear to be added naturally.
The anchor text of links is so critical to determining the value of a link that a number of SEO
software packages actually give you counts and percentages of the keywords used in the anchor
text. Have you ever tried to have your anchor text changed by the webmaster that has the link
to your site on their page? It can take months if it ever happens. I'm sure you can understand
it as a webmaster - changing the anchor text on someone else's link adds zero value to your
bottom line and is usually just about the last thing you will pick to do - it just doesn't
produce any income. Natural Links Exchange gives you the ability to change the anchor text
of your link which resides on a web page controlled by another webmaster with in a very short amount of time yet gradually so it's natural.
All you do is update it in the database and the next time that page is generated, it will
update your link.
Variation of keywords and unique content are both important so Natural Link Exchange allows
you to have multiple mini articles and therefore multiple anchor text values. There is no
limit on the number of mini articles you have. You can also set the distribution by percentage
allowing you to control the keyword variation directly.
The ability to have multiple mini articles also helps minimize the affect of duplicate content. This freshness again positively
impacts the search engine spider visits because the content is changing frequently.
Static or Dynamic - It's Your Choice
Natural Link Exchange pages can be added to your site in 3 different ways. PHP, ASP, or FTP. In PHP or ASP, link pages will be created on the fly. In the past search engines used to struggle with dynamic pages especially pages with really long URLs. However this is not as common of a problem as it used to be so the easiest way to setup Natural Link Exchange is to add either PHP or ASP to your site.
Alternatively, if you are still not comfortable with using dynamic pages as you are either not familiar with setting them up or if you believe search engines can't read them, you can use FTP to have pages sent directly to your host. These pages are completely static so there is no fear on how the search engines will perform. There were indications in the past that static vs. generated had a significant factor in determining the position of pages in search engine results - if this is a concern to you, we handle it via FTP. These static pages are hosted on your server so they are your pages and appear that way to the search engines. This leaves no "bread crumbs" for search engines to accuse you of violating any rules. Remember that Natural Links Exchange are human edited before being placed on your links page so there is no fear of being banned for using automation.