What's a ntural link?

Right, so a link in is a vote for a site, but what else did my example show us?

Well, for a start, 'natural link building' is not necessarily always on topic. Just because it's a hobby blog linking to a first aid site doesn't mean it's any less - it's actually natural. Especially if the recipients see the nice things he's written about them on his blog and then link back to the page saying about his recovery.

Second, link building isn't always from a content page to the home page. The rider wouldn't link to the home page - he links to the page showing the content that is relevant to him.

But the anchor text is is usually relevant to the linked-to site. His link text would probably be 'pictures of my accident' - relevant to a site about first aid. Also, it would be unusual for everyone linking to a content page to use the same text. His friends might link to it as 'Fred's accident pictures' etc.

Lastly, and this is important, if he's writing a blog then the post page is probably only going to have that link and maybe one or two other links on the content page. It's not a page of 50 to 100 links - just the one or two links.

So, assuming that search engines are doing their best to find 'natural links' rather than built links, what would they look like? Well, they would be on pages of only a couple of external links maximum, they would possibly point directly to a content page rather than a home page (but not always) and they would use different link anchor texts.

It's not necessarily true that the links would be one way - it could easily be reciprocated and definately not always within the same topics - off-topic linking is just as relevant as on-topic, maybe more?