How "Internet Phenomenon" Gain Links Over Time

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Top thread.
Some of the things you have said are absolutely in line with my own thinking.
I really believe that a handful,, if not a big portion of your links should be with a very bad and sloppy anchor text.
This will make the offsite optimization look much more natural and less controled and manipulated.

The consistency of the link building i cannot comment on as i have no information either way,, fast, sporadic or slow to contribute but i would say you were very right about everthing in the post.

Thanks for the investigation and letting us know the results. We all know that we should try to mimic natural link building while doing SEO, but it has to be pointed out first what natural link building really is. This is definitaly one step in that direction, thanks!

It was about a time somebody said these issued aloud...

When reading this I started thinking of developing a tool to analyze this sort of "historical data". After all, many SEOs have a huge pile of log files over years (or then I'm an exception ;).

Basically it shouldn't be hard, but it is... You just need to collect individual referrers from log files and date when they were spotted. And draw a graph of link gain speed. Simple so far...

To put it more "real life", one should also take PageRank into account. After all, it measures the likelyhood of a visit - if a high PR page gives you a natural link, then you should also gain more links from other sources. The problem is that usually we SEOs don't have full historical PageRank data about our referrers. Yes, I know an excact date when I received a PR8 backlink but about PR1-3 pages usually not...

Awesome post!

I must have spent the last 2 hours looking though that wiki article.

Scott Fish

Hello Rand,

that's good to point out, and interesting as well.

Thanks gang.

A couple more points I noticed:

1. Natural links often come and go - we think of lifetime links as being very important, but for "phenomenon" sites and pages, they're often listed for a week, a month, or even a day, then removed in favor of new content. Some naturally temporal links probably can't hurt you...

2. Even "phenomenon" do some promotion - typically using community sites like Livejournal, MySpace, del.icio.us, or a forum or blog post... You don't have to completley forego active linking, just make it a small part of the overall links coming to the site.

It's not something I know for sure or either I tested... so please don't blame or shoot at me if you disagree.

But I heared in a few places a thinkg related to this and I decided to share.

It looks like the three most used anchor text are:
"here"
"click here"
"check here"

And some people claims that a site qith quite a lot of backlinks but without any link containing one of these three keywords (or witha very low density... let's say one in 1000 BLs) looks unnatural and may turn on a trigger or attract a penality.


I don't knwo for you but I always try to keep the links linking to my site with one of those 3 anchor texts at 2% or so.

What you said above does make sense.

All of a sudden there will be a load of reciprocal links being mailed round the internet with these `new` ideas.

Hi please can you link to be site as i have added a link to yours at www.spamblah.com/partners

Please link back to www.viagraspam.com with the anchor text `click here for the best darn site i have soon on the interweb`

I am getting some funny reactions from my link partners

Depending on what you're offering/selling, a lot of pronouns come into play as common "natural" anchor text:

these
this
those

For content, there are other popular short anchor texts, like:

said
says
is
was
will be

This is why it's so critical to have some natural content that gets natural links - so you at least know what it looks like before building up and out a "natural" link campaign.

I'm gonna disagree with some of the posts above.

I realize natural anchortexts are very industry (and language/country) specific, but making generalizations like "use click here as anchortext for 2% of backlinks to mimic organic links" is very, very bad practise and extremely misleading.

The "common natural anchor" is different for each industry, site, and even for page... Analysis and research of existing natural backlinks is the way forward - guessing games only lead to problems.

Oh, I don't know... "click here" seems common reguardless of industry. ;)

2k does have a point.
But the way things are now with google and the like, who knows whats best?
All we can do is try the silly stuff because sometimes you find a rare gem when you are doing unexpected stuff.

Sometimes the simples approach is the most efficient: make content people link to.