An Experiment in Natural LInking vs SEO

As SEO's we think about links almost contantly. It's impossible to move on the seo fora and blog circuit without seeing a dozen or more posts or threads about something related to linking. As a natural result of operating in a link driven search landscape we may actually forget what a natural link looks like. Follow the link above for the full blog post.

Bloggers are familiar with the natural link, as are educational sites and larger forums. They come primarily as a result of a) having great content people need/want to link to and b) being part of a 'group' or subgroup in some way on a particular theme.

As far as SEO's go, I see people like Jill Whalen, Doug Heil, Alan Perkins as copy writers and designers first, and SEO's second. No slight intended there, it's just that after spending a fair amount of time in Jills excellent Blackhat/Whitehat Article thread I got to learn quite a bit about the way that a small but not insignificant percentage of what I will continue refer to as professional seos think.

Apart from the odd one or two, they do actually link hunt, though of course it's ethical linkhunting lol! - What was interesting for me though was the thoughts that occured to me as a result of being part of that thread and trying hard to grasp concepts that quite frankly, i find slightly confusing.

I've often remarked here at TW that i have not sought out links for this site. I'll add to that the fact that apart from making the site bot friendly, not one thing has been done to it that could be labeled 'seo'. Why? Well, there are several reasons, none of which are presented in jest:

1. I dont have the time
2. I dont consider volume of visitors important
3. I do consider quality of visitors important (ie. they fit the exact target audience)
4. Im facinated with the non-seo progress of the site.

What interests me about the progress, is how the links develop, where they come from and what kind of people take the time to actually sign up as members. And to that last, what percentage of signups actually post somthing.

So far it's been both interesting and dare I say, moderately successful. If you take a look at what google considers the theme of threadwatch and what Yaho reports for linkdomain:threadwatch.org you'll see that for a 5/6 week old site that specializes in linking out rather than linking in, it's interesting stuff. Whether I can glean anything particularly useful from this remains to be seen but like I said, it's interesting.

Linking to Content we Would Rather Not

On a related subject, I was talking to Black_Knight in a cre8asite thread by Mike Grehan on popularity being a consensus not algorithm, about linking out to content you would personally rather not. He had this to say:

This would also work in reverse, there are people that run websites out there that I really dont get on with and am loathe to give them links but the quality of their content, be it in it's uniqueness, it's speed of delivery or the knowledge contained within it, forces me to either link out, or to be incomplete. Although this websites content is primarlily derived from other peoples content, the uniqueness of it's arrangement, taxonomy and depth of quality would likewise force all but the most thick headed to link to me also. Funny old game eh?

So Where is All this Heading?

Your guess unfortunately is as good as mine, but i will say that im extremely bullish on community driven content right now. The power of blogs is undisputed, well optimized forums continue to bring in 100's of K's worth of highly specific phrases and the idea of encapsulating and converting communication to content, call this communicontent, is a fast spreading concept in the world of mobile communications even.

For me, this is an interesting experiment in natural linking, word of mouth, the power of community and whether or not I have the stamina to maintain threadwatch's fast pace hehe!

Nick