What natural links are to you may not be natural to Google !

The saga of “Natural links and Google” continues. The latest episode being this one from Matt, where he says that links must indeed be “natural” and not merely appear natural.

The entire SEO industry would completely agree to what Matt said. Links should be natural, and not “artificial”, but the problem is that not many people do understand Google’s version of “natural links”.

In my humble opinion any links placed irrelevantly anywhere on your site is a non-natural/artificial link.
So that includes, sponsored reviews, paid text links etc.
Now, if any of these “non-natural links are advertisements, then that’s completely different.
Advertisements are okay, even though technically they are “Nofollowed – Sponsored Links”.

But why do Google have a problem with paid links / artificial links ?

- Because the link might take you to a non-contextual/non related source.
- Because the sponsored review post you did might totally be of of context of your domain.
And so, when google spiders your content, they might get “misleaded” to non trusty or simply non-relevant source.

Problem No.1
The problem with the web is that not all are SEO’s or webmasters. SEO’s constitute may be 20-30% of the web but the rest are people seriously dealing with great amount of information, be it on blogs or their websites. And not all of these people know that Google doesn’t quite like you to plug that link of your friends or the guy who paid you to do so.

Problem No.2
Google does not and I firmly believe that it cannot ever give us concrete rules on what artificial links are. Because clearly, not everyone on the internet can take Goog’s perspective, and Google knows it best. Here’s an example.

Go to this post on the Google official blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/day-in-cloud-challenge-featuring-google.html

In the post Google posts a link to Virgin America. Its contextual technically because the blog post deals with a contest. Fair enough. But I’m wondering how would Google see this had the post been on a normal blog ?

- The link on the Google blog is not nofollowed. But can it be left the same way in another low profile blog ?
- The link is to a reputed website (of virgin america), but does that mean every webmaster can follow what Google did and link to any website that they might think is “friendly and reputed?”

Now, this is the problem with natural links. What is natural to you may not be natural to Google. And sadly, not everyone are webmasters and SEO’s to understand this.
If only Google came up with a clear and precise explanation on what “natural links” are.

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