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Boosting Link Popularity With Natural Linking

By Sebastian, KremlPorn.com

High rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are more and more dependant on weighted link popularity. Content is still king, but two pages carrying the same valuable content can rank #1 and #300 depending on their link popularity.
This article describes the model of a 'Niched Hub', designed to boost the link popularity of money making content rich sites using 'natural linking' compliant to the search engine's policies. It can be applied to an isolated empire and environments of tens of thousands of participating sites owned by a bunch of webmasters as well.
A 'Niched Hub' is not a spider trap. In fact the design avoids all known link patterns the search engines dislike and penalize. It works like old fashioned 'manually driven' link exchanges, using linking structures which reflect the real net.

Backgrounds

Approaches to boost link popularity are not a new thing. But, automated or not, nearly all this projects resulted in banned domains, penalties and decreasing SE traffic in the end.

Back To The Roots

Why do spidertraps fail? They aren't genuine. Search engines have huge databases and they do analyze link patterns. Since webmasters begun to manipulate link popularity the search engines started to penalize link spam. The war between SE engineers and webmasters escalated and nowadays the engines react highly sensitive regarding all kind of suspect SEO techniques. High sophisticated search engine optimizing requires monitoring the engines and changing the own stuff all day long. The engines are a month or two behind the state of the art SEO, more and more webmasters are caught and their sites are banned from the SERPs. I say, this is the point of return. Lets go back to the roots and boost our link popularity in old fashioned ways. This does not mean we can't automate some tasks. It means, the results must be of a natural kind.

Natural Linking

Instead of designing complex link patterns, which will be discovered by the engines in the end, lets try the chaotic approach which is dominating the real internet. Some rules of thumb:

Less is more: A handful of relevant links count more than a zillion of links from poor sources.

Link themed: A handful of links from pages dedicated to the same or a similar theme count more than a zillion of links from generic pages.

Link valuable: If you believe a link is valuable for the surfer who is visiting your site, then put up the link. If you doubt, do not link.

Avoid systematic patterns: Not every link exchange must be reciprocal. A page carrying only reciprocal links uses a systematic link pattern. Find a good mixture of bilateral and unidirectional links. Reciprocal equals not bidirectional in its technically meaning ;)

What are the link 'patterns' the engines do not penalize? A picture says more, so look at this:
Natural link patterns and theme relevancy

Natural link patterns and theme relevancy

Reciprocal links (1a) in general are not penalized, but clusters of pages using only reciprocal links get banned sometimes. When it comes to page ranking, only themed reciprocal links (1b) are counted to measure the link popularity of a page. Useless links from cucumbers to wheels are ignored.

By the way, do you know what a link is? I guess your answer is something like 'A link is a connection between hypertext pages' followed by a detailed explanation of link attributes, protocols etc. Sorry, your answer may be technically correct but it is incredible incomplete. First, for your visitor a link is a path to more information/content of his interest. Second, for the search engine a link is a vote for another page. If the linked page is not relevant, the surfer will go away, hopefully hitting his back button, but more likely lost forever. SE crawlers, designed to find valuable content for their users, may ignore or penalize an irrelevant link.

To understand natural linking keep the surfers interest in mind and act as a webmaster without commercial goals who tries to give the very best to the visitor. A natural link (2a) is introduced by intentions like 'Get more of [page topic]', 'See also this [page topic related] relevant stuff' or in the best case 'Do not miss out this [page topic] site'. On pages designed for targeted (SE) traffic do not use money bars (they are a nice instrument to filter traffic on pages placed at the corona of your network, but they will fail here). Don't link from a blowjob site to a bikini site. Provide themed links (2b).
So far the basics. We have a more complex network of sites in mind, so apply the above said to a larger amount of pages (3a). This picture shows the (link) interaction in a natural network of pages. Components are themed directories, webrings, (reciprocal) links on links pages, unidirectional links on content pages, small interlinked niche clusters etc. Link patterns vary from page type to page type but overall there is no systematic pattern.

The next picture (3a) stresses the theme relevancy in such natural networks.

'Niched Hub' Architecture

Now replace the Vegetables Directory by My Niched Hub and imagine the other pages are all paysites and AVS premium sites of one niche. What you get is the surface of a niched hub. The invisible parts are outgoing links from the hub to feeder sites which are not reciprocal and unidirectional links from other related sites and directories to the hub. The whole picture (4a) below shows the lack of systematic link patterns:
Niche Traffic Hub Architecture

The money making sites are randomly interlinked. In large environments you need a script generating ready to use code snippets like webrings, short link tables and such stuff per participating site. A single page should not carry more (usually less) than a dozen outgoing links leading to randomly selected participating sites plus a link to the hub. This link to the hub is not really bidirectional (4b). The hub is linking to a tour page and the site links back to the hub on a different page, probably located on another domain. Considering that every webmaster has an individual style, even his templated premium sites differ in structure and content, the code snippets link to a different set of sites, vary in design, will be placed on different page types with varying prominence ... the result will be a chaotic (natural) crosslinking without systematic link patterns.

Benefits

A niched hub will feed involved sites with targeted traffic even if the traffic coming from the hub itself is low in the beginning (what can be changed with ease later on). The model (structure) is designed to boost the link popularity of the participating money making sites. But even the feeder sites will earn a little link popularity. Higher link popularity results in better positions on the SERPs. Top spots on the SERPs increase targeted search engine (newbie) traffic. SE crawlers cannot measure traffic nor its productivity rating a page and following outgoing links. As long as only content rich sites are involved(!!), the links are valuable votes for the link target. The above said is valid for nearly all major search engines ranking (partly) based on link popularity, but keep in mind that they have different approaches based on different ranking algorithms.

The next picture explains the inheritance of link popularity by Google's PageRank™ technology. PageRank™ is a complex method to rank all pages on the web based on weighted link popularity. Google's high sophisticated ranking algorithm, well known and trademarked as 'PageRank', confuses lots of people. It is a technology to rank pages, but it contains some components which could be better described as 'SiteRank' and 'DomainRank' too. The name 'PageRank' comes from Google's founder Larry Page, not from 'page' by the way.
Googles PageRank Simplified

Please note that above the amount of PageRank™ donated by the source page and given to the target page is overstated to stress the effect of valuable votes. In fact the portion of PageRank™ given to the targeted site is dependant on the number of outgoing internal and external links on the source page, which does not lose PageRank™ by linking as long as the source and target page is a 'trusted, important and valuable page' and not a link farm and/or penalized page.

By the way, the Google Toolbar™ displays only ranges and often guesses, so don't take the slider display too seriously. Check Google's cached page feature to determine if a PageRank is guessed or not. If a page is not cached it has no PageRank (yet).

Generating PageRank™ from 'nothing' seems to be possible. The total PageRank™ of the web is equal to the number of pages on the web. Thus adding a new page to a site increases slightly the PageRank™ of (usually) the site's root index page, from where PageRank is spreaded across all (linked) pages of the site including the new page, based on (link) content, importance, depth etc. Every outgoing link on a page decreases its potential to bequeath PageRank™ and every inbound link increases its PageRank™. Google's public ranking scale from 1/10 to 10/10 (0/10 indicates a penalty, a useless page or sometimes a page not yet spidered/ranked) splits the total PageRank™ of the web into 10 parts. The Google Toolbar™ displays a value from 1 to 10 showing in which range the page in question is ranked. A book would be needed to explain the formulas, so I skip the details and come straight to a set of requirements every single page involved in a niched hub has to fulfil.

Page Design Requirements

Of course penalized or banned domains cannot participate in a niched hub. Domains hosting spidertraps, fraudulent doorway pages and other link and index spam cannot participate. Pages with hidden/invisible links cannot be used. On 'clean' domains it could be a good idea to copy and modify tour pages to fulfil the requirements below, which should be applied to all source and target pages involved, even if they are only a target, carrying no outgoing links to other involved pages.

Every single page must have:

A page title which is not spammy, but contains a keyword phrase. The page title should be made visible on the page using H1 tags.

A fair amount of content. At least 4-5 visible sentences of keyword rich text, that means more than 200 characters, better are 500 characters or more. A little more is better, 250 to 500 words of visible body text and text in ALT/TITLE tags is a good amount of content. Avoid keyword overwhelming and do not repeat sentences or phrases in variations. All guessed values of 'best keyword density' are kinda fairy tales or outdated information. Just write natural, readable and visible text. Images must have ALT tags, especially linked images.

No irrelevant links, that means only links from and to pages of the same theme. Links to central TOS or Title 18 U.S.C. 2257 info pages can be tolerated, even when they lead to another domain. But this pages should be clean, that means no huge amount of outgoing links and a NOINDEX robots meta tag to avoid 'PageRank™ leaks'.

Less than a dozen outgoing links on content pages, less than 20 outgoing links on link pages. Internal links don't count.

A few internal links, e.g. to tour pages, preview pages etc. on the same domain.

A good balance between inbound links and outgoing links, that means more inbound links than outgoing links. In the beginning you may adjust the balance with internal links, but on the long run a couple of links from other domains is a must.

Links to 'bad neighborhoods' are forbidden, that means absolutely no recips to ominous links lists, link and banner exchanges or penalized/banned sites and most free hosts. If you link to such URLs your site will be penalized by the engines or even banned.

Every link must carry a keyword phrase as anchor text. In addition you should use TITLE tags with text and image links (A HREF=URL TITLE=Long keyword rich text). Replace 'next', 'back', 'join', 'enter' and 'home' anchor text in internal links by keywords.

A Google PageRank™ of 1/10 or higher in the beginning. Of course brand new pages are fine too. A source page must be ranked at least 4/10 to push the target page short-dated. Votes from lower ranked pages will help in the future, when all involved pages are higher ranked. Other engines do not provide this information, therefore I suggest to use Google's PageRank™ as a standard ranking measurement.

Other promotional activities what means, the involved pages must be the target of active and continuously promotion by the webmaster. It does not help a lot to build a small isolated cycle of pages voting for each other. Depending on the targeted keywords (or keyword phrases) a much higher PageRank™ (or link popularity in terms of other search engines than Google) as a niched hub can produce is needed to get top spots at the SERPs.

This rules aren't excessive. In fact they are just common sense and should be kept in mind designing any page. Read Google's Dos & Don'ts, the above said should be a more detailed explanation of their policy. A niched hub must be compliant to the rule 'Feel free to exchange links with other sites that are compatible with your site's content and users' interests.'. Only valuable sites (from the users as well as the engines perspective) should participate. In larger environments it's a must to establish an instance approving participating webmasters and sites. A niched hub just automates some tasks to make the webmaster's life a little bit easier, what is legit, but it can be abused.

Other major engines have not so stringent rules, more or less their rules are subsets of Google's (not completely published!) policy. I guess you're safe as long as you follow the leader.

A Niched Hub's Network

The next picture (6a) simplifies the process of PageRank™ generation in a running niched hub. Picture (6b) shows three of many possible variations of the relationship and PageRank™ flooding between the hub and money making content sites.
PageRank Generation

In fact the hub should give away more PageRank™ to the money makers than it receives from them. That works because first the hub has 3rd party PageRank™ sources and overall a higher amount of inbound links. Second, the hub is designed as a content rich site producing PageRank™ itself. Third, the hub links from a couple of pages to the money makers.
Finally lets see how the hub's central links list is constructed:
The Niched Hub Detailed

Warnings

Linking in general is a good thing, the internet is based on hyperlinks. There is nothing to say against helping each other with valuable and themed links, as long as the search engine's users are satisfied. Links provided for the sole purpose of increasing rankings in search engines is abuse of search engines and they do strike back.

The model outlined above can be used to cheat the engines like any other automation if it's not carefully implemented and frequently audited.

The above said contains not more than a few basics and enough details to enable a webmaster to build a niched hub with own sites. To implement a niched hub in a complex environment like Niched Hubs, a professional team of SEOs, programmers, designers and editors is needed.

Thanks to all you volunteering gals and guys for the great help and support to launch and operate Niched Hubs as a tool to help each other free of charge!

Sebastian, a former managing director of a German business consulting firm, stepped into the adult industry in December 1999. He operates mostly AVS sites and a content shop at KremlPorn.com. Sebastian initiated the first niched hub in 2002 and is the author of other search engine insights at YNOTNews.