“Naturalness” is Link Affinity’s own algorithm. It is calculated by assessing the natural balance in a link profile.
This balance has three fundamental pillars
For the final assessment of Naturalness, which ranges from 0 (lowest value) to 100 (Total Naturalness), first a calculation of the naturalness of each of these three indicators is carried out separately.
Affinity: This value corresponds to semantic affinity. But this time the natural balance is measured. If in your link profile we find that there is a lack of high affinities, this could indicate that the strategies that have been carried out have built authority through artificial links with the sole objective of increasing mathematical authority to manipulate the rankings.
If, on the other hand, we find that there is an excess of high affinities, we will probably find ourselves with an unnatural and forced link building strategy. Each of these indicators separately does not say anything conclusive, but when we analyze them together they provide robustness to the algorithm.
Authority: One of the most used techniques for link building and although it no longer works as before, it is still done is to focus your link building strategy on sites with high DR, DA or the indicator corresponding to the tool you usually use. These mathematical indicators are easily manipulated and Google knows it. In our naturalness analysis, if we detect that your link profile has a high percentage of high authority sites that do not have a direct semantic relationship, it sets off alarm bells telling us that it is an artificial strategy. In this case, a balance is also sought, only we add affinity to value the naturalness of the authority. Among other factors, this indicator measures whether your strategy has been based on the purchase of links on platforms.
Safety: It is about measuring the balance of the risk of relating to certain websites that have been penalized by Google, that do not have authority and do not deal with your topic. If you notice, we always talk about balance because having spam sites in your link profile is natural, in fact if you didn’t have them, the naturalness alarms would also go off. But everything has its necessary balance. Whether you have had negative SEO or if you have or have carried out an obsolete link building strategy by creating hundreds of links on low-quality sites, our “Safety” indicator will warn you.
This indicator has a very interesting fact. It is updated every time you do a “Recrawl” of your campaign. So if you see that Google has launched an Anti Spam Update or whatever, you can validate if your link profile has been affected in some way. It doesn’t usually vary much, but if most of the sites you interact with are penalized, it is more than likely that your naturalness will decline.
Finally, the general “Naturalness” indicator will assess each of the indicators separately and the natural balance between them.
We use it a lot to assess whether it is necessary to clean up artificial link building strategies by sending a “disavow” to Google. I recommend you read the blog article in which we discuss this topic.