We all know that links are a must if you’re going to get good search engine rankings. Google’s algorithm has been centered around links to websites for years. In fact, since the beginning, links for ranking in Google have been important. And as Gary Illyes once admitted, they tried testing the Google organic search engine algorithm without links. And apparently that didn’t work out so well. So, you still need links to rank well in Google’s natural search results.
Natural Links are Important
Not every link is a good link. In fact, ideally, it’s the natural links to your website that are so much more important that links that you build yourself. Admittedly, Google has gotten better over the past few years at identifying good versus bad links. And with the Google Penguin algorithm being a part of the real-time Google algorithm (it has been for a while now), if you get some unnatural links, you’ll know pretty quickly, as your rankings will most likely go down or get worse.
You need natural links, ones that Google can’t identify as unnatural. So is it even possible to get natural links to your website?
Sure it is.
How Do You Get Natural Links?
So, how do you get natural links to your website? Concentrate on creating good content. Content that people want to share and people want to actually read. Yeah, I know, you’ve heard that over and over again. What you really need to do, though, is “blow up your industry”. I mean, write content that makes people in your industry say “wow”.
In the SEO and Search industry, it’s increasingly difficult to get natural links. It’s more and more difficult to get one of your competitors to link to you. So, you have to step up your game. The content game, that is.
And, I can honestly tell you that “link bait” and “click bait” type headlines still work.
Here’s an example of that.
I wrote a post about one month ago that ended up getting over 100 natural links to it. Some links are better than others, but many of them actually sent traffic to the blog post.
I did nothing except for sharing the post on social media. On my own social media accounts–I didn’t do any “black hat” or “gray hat” type of social media tactics, and did absolutely no link building to the post.
So what’s the results?
104 fresh links to the page.
31 unique domain names linking to the page.
Trust Flow 29
Citation Flow 30
The anchor text looks “natural”, as the links don’t use the same anchor text in the links. Although 10 sites actually use the same anchor text, which most likely is due to one person who owns multiple sites duplicating the content and linking 10 times.
You can look up the links to that post and see the data. The above screen shots are from Majestic.
So, yes–it is possible to get natural links to your website. Just write great content–or content that people want to read, share, and link to. Here’s what Buzzsumo is reporting as the number of shares:
In this case, it looks like about 2 shares on social media ended up being about 1 link from other websites. Every other time someone shared it, the post got a natural link.
What About the Traffic?
So, you’re probably wondering about the traffic to this blog post, and whether or not people were reading the post and engaging with it. We know they engaged with it–there are social shares. But what about the Google Analytics traffic?
Most traffic was direct to the site. Then, being mentioned in a newsletter sent the most traffic, followed by Twitter and some other articles that were written based on the post. Google ended up sending only 2 percent of the traffic to the page. So, I can honestly say that Google organic isn’t necessarily the best source of traffic nowadays.