Stuntdubl Business Search Marketing Consulting

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
-Frank Lloyd Wright:

I don’t envy search engine engineers at all. It must be pretty tough to combate thousands of spammers on a daily basis while not pissing off a lot of business owners in the process. Their job sounds like a pretty delicate balancing act.

With that in mind, there must be threshholds for the different variables. They are of course much more intradependent on one another then I will get into here, but I thought I’d throw out some general guidelines that seemed fairly logical to me. I would imagine G, Y, and M have VERY in depth statistical analysis of what is “natural” on the web. Here’s some of my quick down and dirty guesses at what would be “natural”.

It should be noted that this is all sheer speculation from just a few minutes of pondering a subject that often comes to mind. Repeat: these are pure speculation, and several are weighted “on the safe side” (at least in my mind).

Simple benchmark rules for an SEO campaign

• Direct Reciprocal links
  Under 50% of backlinks
• 3-way and neighborhood links
  Under 70%
• Title tags
  Between 3 - 20 words seems about normal
• Heading tags
  3 - 10 words
• Alt tags
  3 - 5 words
• % of “keyword anchor text”
  less than 60%
• % of “natural anchor text” (click here, url, site name)
  greater than 10%
• % of unique anchor text (only occuring once)
  greater than 10%
• Unique linking domains to total backlink ratio
  Logic may dictate the lower the better for G (ROS links are a good indicator of purchased advertising)
• Deeplink ratio
  greater than 10% (but probably higher relative to site or size)
• Unique linking domains on same class C IP address
  Greater than 10(?) may indicate a network (like a web host) and be devalued
• Outbound link text characters to total content characters %
  Greater than 80% of characters as anchor text is probably bad

I can see how it would be fairly easy to setup rules, and relative rules. I can also see how tricky this would get real fast, and why there is collateral damage with every update. Act natural…they’re watching!?!