Natural link
A natural link is one a site owner chose to give you because your page was worth pointing to, with no payment or deal behind it.
A natural link is a link another site gives you because it wanted to. A writer found your page useful, mentioned it, and linked to it. Nobody paid, nobody swapped, and nobody asked for a particular keyword. It's also called an editorial link.
These are the links search engines are built to reward, and the ones their spam policies try to protect.
What makes a link natural
The reason it exists. A food writer covering home espresso links to Kestrel Roasters' grind size chart because it explains the subject better than her own notes would. That's natural. If Kestrel had paid her for the link, the same link on the same page would be a paid link.
Natural links tend to share a few traits. They sit inside the text of a page about a related subject. Their link text fits the sentence, often your brand name or the page title. And they come from all kinds of sites, big and small, at an uneven pace.
How you earn them
You can't place natural links, but you can give people reasons to make them:
- Publish things others want to point to, like original data, clear guides or a useful tool
- Get your news in front of the journalists and creators who cover your field
- Be easy to cite, with a clear page for each topic and a stable address
- Answer questions in the places your customers ask them
For example, say Fernhill Coffee publishes a yearly survey of how much people in the UK spend on coffee at home. Every January, newspapers and blogs quote the numbers and link to the survey. Fernhill didn't ask for any of those links.
Natural links and AI answers
The pages that give natural links are often the same pages AI platforms read before they answer: news, reviews, guides and roundups. The link helps your own page rank, and the page it sits on is something an answer can quote. Original research is one of the surest ways to get both, because people need a source to cite.