What the heck is a natural link profile anyway?
There has been some recent speculation on Twitter as to whether Google has any patents or research that outline what a ‘natural link profile’ actually looks like.
I have read a few thousand patents from Google, and they have never referred to a "natural link profile" in any of those.
— Bill Slawski ⚓ (@bill_slawski) August 20, 2019
Prominent SEO researcher Bill Slawski responded stating that there hasn’t been any reference to natural link profiles in Google’s patent material.
However, Google has frequently commented on ‘unnatural links’ and how bad they are, so surely this means that the concept of a ‘natural link profile’ must have some kind of shape to it. This becomes more difficult when you consider how content marketing works and how Google supposedly differentiates between a natural link profile and an unnatural one.
In other words, nobody believes Google is smart enough to know a natural link profile when it sees one. Many websites are successful using content marketing practises that produce links that are arguably unnatural, proving that Google clearly isn’t cracking down on it, most likely because it can’t tell if the blog it’s scanning was paid for behind closed doors.
Ultimately, a ‘natural link profile’ is something that everyone has their own idea about until Google decides to give a definitive set of guidelines.
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