While incorporating strong SEO practices, businesses add links to their content. Some links arrive naturally, while others appear unnaturally. Knowing the difference between natural and unnatural links helps businesses use SEO more effectively. Even if you use the best guest posting service, you’ll still want to know how the links affect your work.
What is an Unnatural Link?
Unnatural links can hurt your page’s ranking on Google search engine pages. Examples of unnatural links include purchased links that don’t fit with the topic of the post. Some unnatural posts are spam, which drops your content’s ranking even more.
What are Natural Links?
Natural links are quality links that improve your site’s domain authority. The natural links can help you rank higher on Google search engine pages. Ideally, a natural link arrives without your knowledge, as a neutral third party adds the link in your document to offer a resource to their readers and your audience.
Google recognizes natural and unnatural links through its artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Somehow, the algorithm can determine if you put the link in your post or another entity did it.
How Do Natural Links Help Your Website?
Unnatural links harm your website, but natural ones help. When Google uses its algorithm to determine where to rank your website on a search engine results page, it calculates the domain authority of every link in your post.
The domain rankings for your natural backlinks also help rank your keywords. The whole SEO package works together, so it’s helpful to add links to your posts and make them look authentic.
Use Helpful Backlink Sources
When you add links with a natural look, consider the source of the link. To help your website rank higher, look for websites connected to your industry. For example, if you’re writing about an educational topic, use backlinks from colleges or educational influencers.
Always check the domain authority before you link content, so Google sees the links as natural and not spam.
Pay Attention to Your Anchor Text
Links require anchor texts, as Google does not appreciate naked URLs in content. The best choice for linking to anchor text is choosing anchor text that fits with the topic of the linked article. If you’re writing about education and you’re linking an article about school lunches, your anchor text should include words related to school nutrition and food.
Google will punish you for linking to the same keywords repeatedly in your content. You can link once to your most important keyword, then link to terms related to the articles from the authority sites.
Including Relevant Content Around Your Link
Before you add your link, write content that makes sense around it. Google has natural language tools that can tell if you are writing fluff or useful content.
You don’t want to be penalized by adding a link to your page, so work hard to make it fit naturally within the topic of your post. Do not repeat your links across your blog posts. Variety helps Google think you are using natural links.
