What is a Naked Link?

Q: What is a Naked Link?

A: A naked link is a hyperlink for which anchor text is the URL itself. As the URL is completely exposed to the readers, the link is referred to as “naked.” A hyperlink is usually attached to text that is connected to the information on the linked page.

Naked links “take away” all unnecessary text, leaving only the URL as a clickable link on the page. Naked links are most commonly found in data citations or other attributions for reference materials.

The link is in a format such as http://www.example.com/.

In order to properly understand Naked links, we must first understand a hyperlink.

Q: What is a Hyperlink?

A: In the world of SEO, a hyperlink is a clickable link to another online page or piece of data. It is also a popular method of navigating across various websites on the internet. These appear as text or images with links and act as a portal to many online pages and websites.

Anchor texts are the most prevalent method of generating backlinks. An anchor text is a hidden or attached link to the image or text. The text is almost always a keyword. It’s popular since it may be linked to certain words that people frequently lookup.

A link that uses the URL of the web page as the anchor text itself is called a naked link or naked URL.

If we talk in terms of SEO and link building, a naked link could be one of the below variants:

Branded link – A link around your company’s name;

Optimized link – Link around the target keyword or key phrase

Naked link – Link around http://format

Q: What is Link Building, and How Does it Work?

A: The process of obtaining other websites to link to yours is known as link building. It’s a vital component of any successful search engine optimization (SEO) plan, and the goal is straightforward: to improve organic search results.

Have you ever wondered how all those results get there so quickly when you do a Google search? They’re from Google’s database; this is a search engine index that is simply a vast and ever-growing collection of data. Google gathers this information through a web crawler, an automated bot.

Googlebot is a web crawler that uses hyperlinks to navigate the internet and collect all of the data kept in Google’s index. In other words, if a web page cannot be reached via a hyperlink, it is not included in Google’s index. And if it isn’t in Google’s index, it won’t show up in the search results.

After Googlebot has crawled your new web page, it’s up to Google to determine how well it will rank when people search for something similar to it. To get to this conclusion, Google considers three factors:

• The quality of your new material
• The number of other websites that have linked to it, and
• The trustworthiness of those websites.

Consider this: every time another website links to your material, it’s showing Google that you’re an expert on the subject. When Google recognises that you know what you’re talking about, it will enhance the ranking of your content in its search results.

The more reliable websites that connect to you, the higher your organic search results will be. The higher you rank in organic search results, the more visitors your website will receive, and the better your business will perform overall.

One more thing to consider is to have a natural link profile while building a link in the post-Penguin age. Do not have more than 1/3 optimized links while keeping the balance between branded and http://links..

Remember that link building is like gray SEO – you can’t get extreme, else you will get Google’s attention & cannot underdo it also. As Google’s algorithm is becoming increasingly intelligent, the greatest SEO technique is to have a strong strategy that adheres to Google’s rules. While there are hundreds of elements that go into ranking a website, naked URLs should not be overlooked in your SEO strategy.

Q: Why Are Naked Links Important?

A: Naked links or URLs should be a key component of your anchor text strategy. This form of connection helps to diversify your anchor text profile, which protects your site from the overuse of anchor text optimisation.

1. Naked Links Help Diversify Your Anchor Text Profile

Google’s Penguin update began targeting and punishing websites with artificial link profiles, resulting in the loss of traffic for thousands of websites. Along with link relevancy, this upgrade also emphasizes the usage of strong anchor text. In general, sites that used their primary keywords as anchor texts aggressively (in large percentages) were marked as breaking Google’s regulations.

The Penguin update means that, while having relevant anchor texts is beneficial, utilizing the exact phrases in links over and over will get you penalized. However, when you use naked links, it helps diversify your anchor text profile which results in a natural and healthy profile which in turn enhances the rankings of your web page or site.

2. Naked Links Help You Dilute Your Link Profile

The most excellent way to dilute your link profiles is to employ naked links. While you figure out if your anchor text profile is a little too aggressive with your money keywords, you can quickly generate some naked URL links to maintain a healthy balance of anchor text diversity.

Naked links don’t build a link between a term and a destination page, but they do provide link equity from the referring website, as well as a way to vary your anchor text portfolio.

Q: How Google Handles a Naked Link?

In response to this question, Google’s, John Mueller, said. “I believe that a naked URL refers to a link that uses the URL as the anchor text. In such a case, the URL is recognised as the anchor text by Google’s algorithm. Our systems, from what I understand, try to recognise this and say, Well, this is simply a linked URL; it’s not like there’s a valuable anchor here. As a result, we can treat this as a link, but we can’t use the anchor text for anything specific. So it’s a normal link from that perspective, and we don’t have any more context.”

The information mentioned above will help you better understand; what a Naked link is and what is its importance in today’s SEO world.

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Navneet Kaushal

CEO at PageTraffic

The author is a first generation entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of India’s most award winning SEO Agency, PageTraffic. He also works as an advisor and consultant with many large companies. He helps value-conscious businesses build site traffic increase the user base, and boost web sales and bolster customer satisfaction. He can be reached @navneetkaushal on Twitter

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