Since its inception, the key to the algorithm which powers the world's most powerful search engine has always been links. The number, quality and type of links that point to a website impact where it ranks for certain search terms and ever since the inception of the search engine itself, it has been an attribute which has been manipulated by search experts the world over.
However, at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference on March 10, 2012, Matt Cutts - the head of the webspam team at Google - announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty, which will target websites that overly optimise for the search engine. This is the latest penalty-related algorithm designed to not only improve Google's search relevancy for users, but also encourage websites to provide high quality content and an enjoyable user experience. By penalising websites that are excessively optimised and feature mediocre content, Google is essentially giving less optimised sites with excellent content an opportunity to improve their rankings. Although the concept of penalising sites for building unnatural links is nothing new, it has certainly been a catalyst for making webmasters more aware about the various pitfalls of 'cheating the algorithm'.
So what will the impact be and how will this effect the results that we see?
The key to building a natural link profile is not to think about links, it's to think about the user. What content do they want to see, is it sharable, will people want to bookmark it? All these questions are the ones truly world class SEO's should be asking. If you don't take these factors into consideration, you could be building an unnatural, unsustainable profile. So what factors contribute to an unnatural links profile?
An over optimised anchor text link profile - It is difficult not to agree that sites with a very large portion of links containing an exact match anchor text will suggest some level of manipulation. When you come across sites that actually have more keyword anchor texts than brand anchor texts that is even more concerning. Wouldn't it be "natural" for people to call you by your first name rather than referring to what you do? It surely will be the same for people to refer to your products and services.
An uneven distribution in the level of authority of links - Looking at the page authority of links pointing to your site, skewed values can indicate a concentration of links with similar values that could imply an artificial acquisition process. This equally relates to having too many links with very high value or with low value. When we think of a natural link profile, in fact, the main reference should really be to the probabilistic and statistical definition of a normal distribution. It is not unnatural for sites to have very high or very low value links; it is just more common for this to occur with a certain distribution.Of course, this will be relative to your niche, your brand, your online activity and many other factors, but essentially, it is about the pattern under which people will react to all of these factors by linking to your site.
A "spiked" link acquisition over time - That is generally known in SEO terms as "link velocity". When looking at the amount of links created over time, signs that can suggest an unnatural profile can also be recognisable. Again, it is not that much about the unevenness of number of links crawled over time, rather about the regularity of trends.
Facts or events related to your site that happen in a particular moment and generate a concentration of links at that point in time are going to happen, and ultimately any online marketing activity is likely to bring that beneficial boost in link popularity. On the other hand, new links created with a very regular and predictable frequency do not reflect that natural buzz around your site.
Amending the damage is certainly the first thing to do. However, the real question is what to do next? Little is done if this is not put into the bigger picture and long term strategy of your site online promotion. The latest algorithm updates and actions from Google are clear and here to stay: the focus is on quality. For Google to serve the best possible search results to users, good sites need to be recognised as such.
Creating "engaging content" is one of those words that make SEO the continuous re-invention of ideas and approaches which this field is about: one objective, many ways to achieve that. What content you generate, how content is presented, to whom or through who content is created and shared? These are all questions a solid link building strategy should respond to through the knowledge of effective communication and atypical formats (e.g. infographics), diversified angles in treating subjects with a clear target audience and the amplifier power of social networks.
So try and have creativity and sharability at the heart of the offsite content you are producing; don't think about the search engines, think about the user.