Natural link building to create hits when?

[MatthewBOnline]

Hello,

When I get natural links to my website, when will the hits rise? (6 months after getting the links)?

[TechnoBear]

I’m sorry, but I don’t really follow your question.

(I do know that there are few if any cases in SEO when you can say “do X, and Y will definitely happen within this timeframe”.)

[bluedreamer]

Just because someone adds a link to your site it doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will click it

[alexphillips61]

What do you mean by natural link? … the links that you have create on other sites or put on your own web page ?

[conormcg94]

The algorithm for google is really complex. So many diferent factors affect how many hits your site gets and how it affects its ranking in the search engine.

[ryansmith1979]

From what I’m understanding from your question you’re asking how long it would take from the time that you gain a natural backlink to your site to the time that you should recieve a rank increase, and in turn, more traffic?

Unfortunately SEO doesn’t work like that and it can’t really be quantified in terms of single links. There are more than 200 ranking factors for Google now and links, albeit still an important ranking factor, is one of many that you need to look at in order to increase your visibility on the web.

There’s no hard and fast rule to be able to drop a link and then see extra traffic. In some cases this may never happen, in other cases it works a treat. it really all depends on the link power and what the anchor text is along with other factors.

Search engines are complicated beasts, it’s best to go for quality content and continue producing this content, share it to social media with the hope that it will get shared more via other websites which in turn will give you a more natural looking backlink profile.

Consistency is key here. Don’t just get one link and then wait, build content then build more content, then more, then more.

Hopefully you get the idea.

[conormcg94]

Adding in to that, do you know if people share your blog post on their facebook profile, it counts as another backlink that google takes into account?

[TechnoBear]

Are you sure about that, @conormcg94? I don’t use Facebook, but I understood they mark user-submitted links nofollow, in accordance with Google’s guidelines.

[conormcg94]

I was actually asking @ryansmith1979 Not exactly sure if it will be follow or no follow. However I have heard from other online marketers in the firm I work for that no follow links still play some role in search engine rankings, albeit smaller.

[TechnoBear]

Sorry - I thought you were stating it as a fact. I should have registered the ?.

The point of using nofollow on user-submitted links is to tell Google (and other search engines) to ignore them, as they have not been “editorially vouched for”, as Google puts it.

@Google

Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.

…

You can prevent PageRank from passing in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=“nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Spam Policies for Google Web Search | Google Search Central  | ...

Although people do post here saying that nofollow links are taken into account in Google ranking, Google says they are not, and I prefer to accept the word from the horse’s mouth.

@Google

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569

[ryansmith1979]

When using any sort of social media it’s not actually counted as a backlink as such. As TechnoBear stated, they are nofollow links but I’ve found that even nofollow links, although not necessarily, passing link juice they are still counted towards relevance and do have a slight ranking factor.

I’ve done a number of tests with ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ and regardless of what Google say or do not say, a good mix is preferable and more realistic. Needless to say that I don’t believe a lot of what Google say as half of their statements are there just to dishearten and discourage the SEOs; blackhat or otherwise.

But saying that, natural link building (ie; link building where you don’t actually intend to build links (basically rely on others to do it for you by reading your great piece of content and sharing), will almost always come on top.