Developing Natural Links For New Sites
Google has moved away from banning sites altogether to automated and human filters that weed out pages that have a link base that is unnatural. The algorithms Google uses are complicated but understandable.
Identify your competition
When researching a new market, I analyze the competition to see what they are doing and what their advantage is. I do a search for the top three keywords I am targeting and find three sites that show up in the top page of Google for each search. Once I have found my competition the fun begins.
What is their domain age
So the first factor in this formula is the domain age for each site. You can check the domain age with this cool little tool. Domain age is actually very important in my experience, especially in respect to the example I am going to use here.
So the three sites that I have analyzed have the following domain age:
Site 1: 5 years 3 months
Site 2: 5 years 2 months
Site 3: 1 year
Alright, this tells me that we have some aged domains coming up in the SERPS, but a site that is less than one year is also able to rank well.
Inbound Links
Inbound links are the single most important factor in establishing credibility with the search engines in most cases. You can use Yahoo! Siteexplorer to see inbound links (here is a video of me using it). So after doing our research I found the following.
Site 1: 150
Site 2: 16
Site 3: 267
I was surprised to see that site 2 only had 16 inbound links. Obviously, domain age is playing a factor here, and the other thing worth noting is that we have a benchmark for a site that is a year old on how many links will be required. Link quality is also a part of the factor here, but we will discuss that later.
How big is each site
We can see how many pages the links are spread across. This gives me an idea of how many links I can build per page.
Site 1: 10 pages
Site 2: 5 pages
Site 3: 20 pages
The formula
To start off with, lets determine the average amount of links to the site based on pages.
Average pages: (site 1 pages + site 2 pages + site 3 pages)/ 3 = 11.7
Average Links: (site 1 links + site 2 links + site 3 links)/ 3 = 144.3
So now lets see what the link to page ratio is:
144.3 / 11.7 = 12.3
Of course, you could find the median instead of the average which would make sense in some cases where there is a serious outlier, but I do not think it is necessary in this case.
So now we know that it is typical for sites in this industry to have 12.3 inbound links per page. This gives us our link capacity for our site. Theoretically, If I have a site with 20 pages, than I know that I could have 246.6 inbound links without triggering a Google filter. Of course we can not just get 246.6 links in the first month without being hit for spamming. So we will discuss monthly link capacity in the next post.
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It is always important to do ample research on the top competitors in your market. Find out what they are doing well and why they are at the top of the search ranks and see if you can copy what they have done and even try and do it better. Remember though, these pages are at the top for a reason so realize it may take some time to overtake them.
hey Jason,
I can see you think! Good idea and good analysis.
I believe it’s always good to survey the competition first. You may find out the fight will be too tough. Or you may find out you’ll never knock #1 out, but #2 is possible.
Don’t just work hard… work hard and smart!
~ Steve, aka Mr trade show booths
I can’t believe the site ranks with just 16 links and only 5 pages. Must be a niche site. Interesting about the links to pages ratio.
I do a lot of research on my competition before building sites, but I have never considered trying to figure out the links per page ratio to get an idea about how many links I should have to my site so that I don’t trigger any Google filters.
I think I am going to have to try it out and see if it actually works – you definitely have given me some good ideas that I will have to implement.
If domain age is such a big factor, it better to use an old domain that’s been online for a few years but targeted at a completely different market or just get a fresh domain and start from scratch?
Khaled,
My opinion is that if the domain is old, it is better. However, switching markets and owners may reset the domain age with Google, its hard to say for sure.
However, if there is an aged domain laying around, sign me up because I want it
Those inlinks, were they site links? If not, they matter, but less. You need to check the number of links to the specific page. I suspect the discrepancy will disappear then.
Well man, thanks a LOT for your article. I’v been just looking for information about “natural links” for one of my new sites.
While clicking on the ecommerce tutorial link above I got this.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function nzshpcrt_shopping_basket() in /home/atlantaweb/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/BlogconversionTheme/sidebar.php on line 4
Could you also tell me if you have a newsletter?
It’s always refreshing to read your posts – thanks again