How does a good link portfolio look like ?

[orion68]

I have been reading a lot about bad links and unnatural links on these forums, but i m not sure how a good back link portfolio looks like, can some point me to the right direction ? maybe with some examples,

what is the one most important factor for a good quality link ?

thanks

[RyanKent]

There are many factors involved but, at a high level, a bad link profile as detected by Google's Penguin algorithm is one with a high percentage of keyword anchor text links.

The way most natural links are created is to copy and paste a link. For example, a link to this Q&A thread is: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-a-good-link-portfolio-look-like. When site owners create links to their own site, they often try to take advantage of Google's algorithm by using specific keywords such as good link thread.

When you take a site which sells watches and you look at the profile and see most of the links are URLs with some occasional anchor text links thrown in, that would be a more natural profile. When you see most of the links use anchor text such as "best watches" or "cheap watches" that indicates a high likelihood of manipulation.

There are numerous other aspects of a good or bad link. Some criteria to consider:

• the PR of the linking page

• the number of links on the linking page

• the position of the link (in content is best whereas a footer link would offer less value)

• the anchor text

• the relevance of the linking site to the target page

You can go to Open Site Explorer and examine the backlink profile of good sites such as Google and the New York Times, then compare it to some spammy sites. You will see the difference quickly.