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Semi-natural linking — a topic for SEOs in 2007

Posted by admin on December 9, 2006 in Link Theory, SEO Theory

This has been a strangely productive morning for me. I went over to Spider-food’s search engine optimization forums to scan posts and share some ideas that have been percolating in my head for a few weeks, and I found myself writing a new paper on Site Wide Links Recapped as of December 2006.

While most people feel they know where they stand on Site Wide links (they want nothing to do with them), I feel more information has come out this year that explains why they leave such a foul taste in so many people’s mouths.

But while writing that piece, I realized something else had developed over the past few months. We have been given enough information from numerous sources (and I did not go into detail on the subject) to begin talking about what I shall henceforth refer to as Semi-natural linking (or Semi-natural linkage). This issue was raised by someone who asked a question in the December 2006 SES Chicago Search Engine Q&A Session.

Q: What if you had lots of clients and getting site credit links (designed by, sponsored by, etc. links)? Is there a penalty on that, from several hundred sites with the same link?

A: Google said two ways to look at this; (1) lots of great software packages that have a link at the bottom that say powered by and that is not manipulative, they wont ignore it either. (2) If 40,000 people say I love this product, all within two minutes, you would be a bit suspicious, especially if they all said the same thing….

Yahoo added that if you have a powered by link showing up on different sites at different sites, even if the link text is the same, they would discount the culmitive affect of that, using Diminishing returns. It gets abusive if you build out sites to do this for you with that intent.

Okay, this is a very significant question, but it ties back to the Site Wide Linking issue because it falls into the class of what I call Semi-natural Links.

Semi-natural linking arises from building relationships between Web sites for non-search related purposes — brand and visibility building, traffic building, and community building are the three main sources that I see today for Semi-natural linking. Site-wide links can actually occur in these kinds of relationships. For example, suppose four people set up a forum on a special topic near and dear to their hearts. Each of them has a Web site. They each add a link to their mutual forum (hosted on a fifth domain) to their navigational links. That forum just received four site-wide links. They didn’t do it for the search engines, they did it to build visibility for their forum among their own visitors.

While it could be argued that only one link on each home page is necessary, navigation links are now customarily propagated across many if not all pages of Web sites. Usability advocates and accessibility advocates encourage structured, predictable linkage to important pages and resources be incorporated in site-wide navigation. But no one has drawn any lines to say that site-wide navigation should exclude links to off-site resources. Many amateur Web sites that are associated with free-hosted forums in fact must link off-site to promote their own forums.

Many sites link out to personal blogs for similar reasons (in fact, though I could easily host blogs on my personal Web site, I choose to place them on Blogger to increase their visibility and make them more available to random visitors who have never heard of me). But many other people sign up with hosting services whose blog features don’t impress the users enough, and they still link out to blogs on other services. Or maybe the brand value of blogging services like MySpace, Blogger, Wordpress, Spaces.Live, etc. is just more appealing to many people.

Semi-natural links may come from clients linking back to product or service providers, or they may come from members of an association linking back to an association home page, or they may come from Site-wide links not intended to influence search engines at all.

Is it a good idea for the search engines to devalue Semi-natural linkage? Do they not benefit from learning where the hubs of relationship-based communities lie? I think Ask would certainly concede that as long as the relationships are textually expressed in a mutual fashion that it would serve their purpose to index and list such sites, organizing those communities according to their relationships.

But here’s the rub: How do you sort out the real Semi-natural links from the artificial ones?

BTW — welcome to my new SEO blog. I have decided to focus my SEO blogging here rather than on Google Says…. While Google is important, the Googlers themselves have pointed out to me that the other search engines are worthy of discussion.