One of the misconceptions many bloggers have about SEO is the more links, the better. This statement is misleading because not all links are created equal. As I do SEO work for Performancing Services, I often come across sites with a low number of links doing well on the search engines. These sites outrank their competitors who have much more links than them. How is this possible?
This is possible because Google puts much more weight on the quality of links over the quantity.
Now much can said about determining the quality of any given link, but that’s for another post. For the purposes of simplicity, let’s just say a quality link is a link from a quality site. Therefore, a link from about.com is much more effective than a link from some obscure site that no one knows about.
This should be great news to you as a blogger, since you actually don’t need that many links to do well on the search results. Too many bloggers have been discouraged by the difficulty of link building. They build their first two or three links and it takes them much longer than they had estimated. They stop building links because they believe they don’t have the time to build a lot of links every month.
However, if they had realized that quality was the name of the game instead of quantity, they could’ve continued and just made sure they only targeted quality links. Acquiring two or three quality links a month can pay big dividends. Even one link per month puts you ahead of most of your competition.
On the other hand, other bloggers who went after low quality links have found that link building didn’t give them the rankings they wanted. But if they had realized that quality trumps quantity, they could’ve spent their resources in a more effective manner and improved their rankings.
One of our link building clients works in a very competitive but lucrative industry. They wanted us to target a couple of keywords. We analyzed their competition, or the top ten ranking sites for the keywords, and realized we had our work cut out for us. Most of the top ten sites had a lot more links than our client’s site. Also, the competing sites were much older, which adds to the difficulty of ranking since age is huge factor for Google. Our client’s site was only two years old while the other sites had many years on their belt.
With only a limited budget, we knew we had to make every link count. We devised a plan that had us building 10-15 links a month. In just four months, we’ve seen our client’s site break through to the top 10 of Google for three of their keywords. These rankings have brought a lot of profits to our client.
There is much more to say about building quality links, so I’ll turn it over to you. What questions do you have about link building?
Also, if you don’t have time to do link building, feel free to use our link building service.
10 thoughts on “In Link Building, Quality Trumps Quantity”
Sound philosophy, indead!
But, what makes up a good link source? (…as you enticed us to ask questions :))
In my opinion, these are some evaluation criteria you should consider:
1. has to have relevance for your blog/website theme;
2. homepage PR of minimum 3 (even better, 4);
3. of course, dofollow enabled;
4. good Alexa ranking;
5. veteran in the niche market
Now, Dee is you call to provide us with additional info 🙂
Related to quality backlinks, I tried to draw a solution for how to go about building a valuable backlink portfolio. If you’re interested, here’s the link to my post:
http://trafficcpanel.com/773/definitive-10-step-strategy-to-link-building/
I hope you’ll find it easy to diggest and implement in your off page campaigns!
Cheers,
Cristian
I wouldn’t call it pimping 🙂 What’s worked for us for getting the top quality links like about.com is finding the blogger(s) in your niche on about.com. Next, see what kind of stuff they link to or write about. Then, create something really good on your site based on your research. Finally, send them an email asking them if could link to it if they think it would be useful to their readers.
Link building is often a numbers game, so don’t be afraid to contact a bunch of bloggers. Many of them are looking for quality content to link to.
Exactly how does one get linked at a site like About.com? Do I just go pimping myself? 🙂
I think that the secret of success in the online marketing varies. Determined on the nature of your own websites, the best approach might differed from some other kinds of individual blogs.
In order to lead your own online marketing into success, it’s necessary to check the marketing approaches of different kinds of websites and try to follow the pattern of the websites with similar nature to yours.
However, quality link building is always one of the most important thing for any kinds of SEO businesses.
As a general rule, I don’t like going after links on unrelated sites. Some sites are more relevant than others. The closer the site is related to your site, the better. If your site has a lot of domain trust, you can take more risks and go after links on unrelated sites, but most of your links should come from related sites.
Thanks for sharing the post. I am 100% agree with the fact that quality matters, not quantity. If quantity matters, anybody could have created 100 blogger blog and link back to their original blog. Could you please explain result of links from unrelated high page rank website? Will it increase the blog value in google eyes?
Could you share your link building method? 🙂
I absolutely concur. What will count more, one link from an authority site like say CNN or a hundred & fifty links from a load of spammy directories?
It is possible to get links from authority sites (well, some of them like the guardian.co.uk for example – a PR9 website) if you know how 🙂
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