Today I’m writing about natural poker links, unnatural poker links, and artificial poker links. The most important insight into natural poker link building I can offer is this: Most people try so hard to LOOK natural that they forget how to BE natural. (Thanks, Steve Badger, for that insight.) If you keep that thought in the forefront of your mind, you’ll probably never have to stress out about being penalized for an unnatural link profile.

What Are Natural Poker Links?

Links are clickable connections from one web page to another.

“Internal links” are links to pages within your own site.

“External links” are links to page on another site.

Natural links are “links which occur in nature”, and these are defined by intention. Before Google launched its link-based search ranking algorithm, why did one web page link to another? Some reasons one page might link to another include:

1. Internal site navigation links
2. Recommendations for other content the reader might like on the same subject
3. Recommendations for other content the reader might like on a different subject

Some poker webmasters don’t think of their internal site navigation links in the same way that they think of links from other sites. That’s a mistake. Good linking practices begin with how you link to and from your own content on your own website, and you should diligently tend to your site’s navigational links.

Recommendations for other content on the same subject that a reader might like could point to more content on your own website that isn’t available via your site navigation. Or they could point to content on the same subject on another website you own. Or they might point to content on the same subject on someone else’s website. Those kinds of links have always occurred naturally on the Internet.

Some poker webmasters might raise an eyebrow at the thought of recommending content on different subjects, especially taken in the context of natural linking. But suppose you own a poker bookstore, and you have a friend who owns a pool hall. Would it be “natural” for you to link to his billiards site? Would it be natural for him to link to your poker books site? Would it be natural for these two unrelated content sites to have a reciprocal link relationship?

Of course it would.

Suppose you own a store that sells poker chips, both online and in a brick and mortar establishment. And suppose you’re a supporter of a local charity. Would it be natural for you to link to that charity’s website? Would it be natural for that charity’s website to link to your site? Would a reciprocal link relationship be a natural occurrence?

Of course it would.

“Unsolicited links” are natural links, but natural links aren’t necessarily unsolicited links. It’s always been natural to ask for links to your content. Eric Ward was asking for links to publicize quality content years before links were a search engine ranking factor.

What are Unnatural Links? What are Artificial Links?

Artificial and unnatural links are built for the SOLE purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. Natural links have intent related to improving search engine rankings, but that’s not their sole reason for existing. For example, I link to this blog from my signature at PAL. Do I hope that this will help my search engine ranking? Sure. But my main goal is for people to realize that I offer poker SEO content that they might be interested in. A good percentage of my traffic comes from my signature links in that forum, so I would continue to link from  my signature whether or not improved my rankings.

From the sidebar, I link to folks like Jeremy Enke and Mike Wittmeyer. They publish blogs about poker affiliate marketing and poker webmaster issues. These issues are pertinent to my readers, so I want them to be able to find those resources. In fact, they talk about poker webmaster issues that I don’t discuss here. Jeremy sometimes writes about viral marketing. That’s a strength of this, but it’s one of my weaknesses. Mike writes from the perspective of a college age male in this industry. That’s a perspective an old guy like Randy Ray doesn’t share.

I didn’t link to either of those guys with the purpose of helping them with their search engine traffic. But if they do see an improvement in their search rankings because of my links, I’m  cool with that.

What’s an example of an unnatural or artificial link? Suppose I’m friends with a poker webmaster who has a really popular and well thought of site that gets a lot of traffic. And I like him, in fact, I helped him get into the poker website business. And I’ve just launched a new site about Omaha poker, for example. (This is all hypothetical.) On my new Omaha poker site, I have a resources page, and I’ve linked to this friend from there. It’s a brand new site, so the toolbar PR of the homepage and the resources page show 0. And my friend decides he doesn’t want to give me a link from his main resources page, which has a toolbar PR of 3, because he’s not getting a good enough “deal” out of the link exchange. But he offers to sell me a link from his Omaha poker page with whatever anchor text I like for just $300 a month.

That situation is starting to have an element of unnaturalness to it. That situation is starting to have an element of artificiality. My recommendation to his site from my resources page is based on respect and fondness for him. His recommendation to my site from his Omaha page is based on greed and money. His reluctance to link to me without a close analysis of the quid pro quo is based on stinginess.

A cynic would say that this is completely “natural”. But for purposes of our discussion here, I’m going to say that these are not natural poker links.

Please note that I haven’t expressed an opinion one way or the other about whether or not you should “buy” poker links. Or about whether or not you should nofollow paid poker links. Google’s and Matt Cutts’s opinions on that matter are pretty clear and are expressed very well elsewhere. I’ll limit my opinion to the obvious. Buying poker links involves an element of risk, and it’s up to you to decide what your risk tolerance is as it relates to purchasing poker links and to selling poker links.

What are some other examples of unnatural or artificial link building? Suppose you get together with ten different webmasters, each of whom owns an average of 35 websites. And you decide, as a group, that you’re going to exchange links from all of your sites with all of their sites. But to make sure that it looks “natural”, you decide to have ten pages of external links on each site, and you’re going to randomly determine which links go on each page. The anchor text is identical, and the description accompanying each link is identical, but the actual links pages themselves have randomly chosen links on them.

This is an unnatural looking link profile. In fact, it’s a classic example of a link farm. Your group of ten webmasters could have gone the extra mile and randomized the anchor text and the description tags too, in order to try to look even more natural, but the whole scheme would still be artificial. You could even reduce the number of links each site was linking to to 175 instead of 350, or to 85, in order create a more random looking backlink profile. But is that natural? Hell, no. In fact, the harder you work at trying to make the whole scheme look natural, the less natural it becomes.

Here’s another example of an unnatural poker links profile. You launch a site on a topic, and you see that the #1 site in Google for that topic has bought links from 100 different pages. So you buy links from those 100 pages. Effective? Maybe in the short term. Natural? Not on your life.

What Is Natural Link Building?

Natural link building is a poker link building methodology where you take into account more than just search engine rankings when you strategize. So if you trade poker links with other sites, you’re trading with sites that you feel comfortable recommending as resources. And if you trade links with sites not related to poker, you feel comfortable recommending them as resources too.

Natural poker link building should begin with linking to and promoting your own content. Natural poker link building should continue with linking to and promoting your friends’ content. And natural poker linkbuilding should also continues with asking your friends to link to and promote your content. This strategy presupposes that you have content worth linking to, and that your friends have content worth linking to. If you’re a friend of mine, and you launch a site with 5 pages of “poker content” that consists of 18 poker banners and 250 words of promotional language about 5 different poker sites, I’m not going to link to your site.

How does content relate to links in a natural setting? Sites with a large volume of content are naturally going to get more links than sites with a low volume of content. A percentage of those links are going to be to internal pages of a site, rather than to the homepage. A percentage of those natural poker links are going to use a variety of different anchor text to link to the content.

What percentage of your links should be to your internal pages instead of your homepage? What percentage of your anchor text should vary from the rest and how much it should vary?

These are the wrong questions to be asking. I don’t know the answers to those questions. Trying to mimic some predetermined percentage is as unnatural and artificial a poker link building strategy as I can imagine.

How Do You Get Natural Poker Links?

You have plenty of options for getting natural poker links:

1. Submit to directories. Does this sound unnatural or artificial to you? It shouldn’t. Directories are in the business of recommending content to readers. Asking directories to link to your site is a perfectly natural means of publicizing your content.
2. Link to your own content. Do you have a network of 5 poker sites on different subtopics within the poker niche? It would be perfectly natural for you to crosslink and cross-promote your content from one site to another. If you have a page about Texas holdem starting hands on your Holdem site, it would make perfect sense to link to your page about Omaha starting hands over on your Omaha site. On the other hand, if you have 50 poker sites that you built with the sole intention of building link popularity in order to convince Google that your main 2 sites are “authority sites”, then you’re no longer getting natural links.
3. Write lots of great content. If your poker content sucks, then all of the links pointing to it are unnatural. Because why would someone recommend poker content that sucks? And if you write lots of content, you give other people lots of opportunities to link to you. A robust 100 page site has 100 different reasons to link to it. A 10 page site only has 10. And the more pages of content you have live on your sites, the more opportunities you have to link to your other pages.
4. Link out to other people’s content without asking. People watch their referral logs. They know and respect webmasters who send them traffic without asking for anything in return. Most of them will return the favor at some point, even if it’s a couple of years in the future.
5. Partner with other webmasters on content. There are multiple ways to go about this. A few years ago, 2 friends of mine and I launched a poker forum together. All 3 of us linked to the poker forum from our poker sites. This was a perfectly natural thing to do, of course. A strategy that I’ve thought about multiple times, but I’ve never gotten around to doing it, would be to launch a poker blog with 4 partners. Each of us would be responsible for posting to the blog 1 day a week. Each of us would have the opportunity to link to our other content from within the blog posts.
6. Comment on blogs. But actually participate in the conversation there. Don’t bother checking to see whether or not those links are nofollow or not. (In a natural linking strategy, you shouldn’t care about nofollow anyway. It’s an unnatural response to an unnatural blog spamming economy and an unnatural link buying economy.) Don’t target your anchor text – just use your name or the name of your site as anchor text. Commenting on blogs and participating in conversations is a perfect example of natural link building.
7. Participate in forum discussions. This strategy for building natural poker links is the same as the blog commenting strategy above. You have to really participate in the conversation. You should ignore whether or not links are nofollowed. You should be low-key and trustworthy when recommending your content. Being shameless is one thing; being obnoxious is another. Learn the difference.

What is a Natural Rate at Which to Get Links?

I focus largely on BEING natural rather than LOOKING natural. So I’ve don’t put mental energy into rate at which I get links to my sites. I launched a website about slot machines once years ago, and I worked aggressively building links to the site. It ranked well, and I sold it. I later launched another slot machine site. This time I traded links with a dozen sites and stopped worrying about link building for the site. The new site outranked the original site in three months.

Does that mean that it’s more natural to only build a few links at the beginning of a site’s launch and then focus on content that attracts links? Maybe.

Or maybe it just means that I got better at identifying which links really mattered to me and my site.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 8:43 am and is filed under Poker Link Building . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.