If you’re doing anything that looks unnatural when it comes to link building, you could potentially receive a penalty from Google.
According to Google’s link scheme guidelines, any link that’s designed to manipulate your PageRank or increase your rankings on Google can be considered part of a link scheme.
In other words, if you want your links to have value and avoid Google penalties, the best way to do that is to make sure that your links look as natural as possible.
So, what do natural backlinks look like? How do you use them to increase your rankings? This article will answer all of your questions about natural backlinks.
Table of Contents
Good Links Vs. Bad Links
What Do Good Links Look Like?
When you scroll down a particular page and there’s a decent amount of good quality content without any spammy advertising, it is likely that it is a good quality link.
Good links look natural because they are well-written and provide value. These pages contain lots of information and are designed for someone to actually consume.
In addition, you won’t see thousands of backlinks from a natural website. Links and anchor texts on the page are highly relevant to the content. Backlinks are actually referenced in the content and only included where they are necessary.
If you maintain a natural-looking site with great content and perfectly placed backlinks in your pages, you will surely get more clients who will want to link to you.
What Do Bad Links Look Like?
An example of a bad link, is a very poorly designed page that is very difficult to read. They don’t look very natural and won’t really make much sense.
It is likely that banners will take up most of the page, with only three sentences on the entire site, and no content at all. You also won’t see any comments which means that no one is engaging with the site.
Many of these bad sites are massive link farms. They will have a thousand links because they are probably selling backlinks and giving them away like free candy. In fact, half of the content will be backlinks.
In addition, seeing a warning sign saying “Not Secure” on your search bar is the most common way to tell you that a link is a red flag.
Conclusion
If you really want to be sure if a link is good or bad, you can enter a website into Ahrefs database. This will let you see if a particular page is getting traffic or not. If you can tell that it barely gets any visitors each month, then it definitely isn’t a natural website.
The biggest difference between a natural and unnatural backlink is that the former is designed for people to actually get genuine value from its content, and the latter is designed to manipulate Google’s rankings.
