Backlinks – Quality Over Quantity

Backlinks – Quality Over Quantity
By Jaron A

While coaching people on their SEO practices, I often see a very common thread with beginners starting to try a hand at link building. When they catch a glipse at the logic behind getting other websites to link to them, their knee-jerk response is to go out and try to get as many links as they possibly can as quickly as they can. They’ve missed, however, the key to effective link building – you must focus on the QUALITY of the links that are pointing to your site, and not so much on the QUANTITY.

While we certainly don’t know the specifics of the algorithms that the search engines use to decide who shows up on the highly coveted first page, we do know some of the general things that can help or hurt you. The following is a short (and by no means comprehensive) list of a few things that will effect the quality of your backlinks.

What is the Webpage’s PR?

Google uses something they call PageRank (PR) to give a general gauge of how authoritative a website is. The higher the PR the better. Using the Google Toolbar you can see what the PR for any given webpage is. Essentially, the higher the PR of the page, the more value it will bring to you when it links to you.

Now, the true value of PR is certainly debatable. And I’m one who doesn’t put a ton of weight on PR. But having said that, all things equal, it’s a decent gauge for you in your link building efforts. So when searching for links, use PR as a guide, but don’t let it make your decisions for you.

How Related is the Website?

As you’ll often hear, each link pointing to your website is seen by the search engines as a “vote” for your website. The anchor text (the text of the actual link) tells the search engines, “For my vote, I say that this website is related to this particular keyword.”

But if my website is about dog cleaning and I’m “voting for” (linking to) a website about construction loans, the search engine isn’t going to put much weight in my vote (just as I wouldn’t go to a dog cleaning company for advice on getting a construction loan). You links coming into your website will be MUCH more effective if they are coming from highly related sites (e.g. a website about financing new businesses linking to a construction loan website). For this reason, you want to make sure that most of your links are coming from related sources.

How Many Outbound Links Does the Webpage Have?

For each additional outbound link on a webpage, the value of any link on that page is decreased. For example, all things equal, a link from a webpage that has only 2 outbound links is caries much more value than a link from a webpage that has 50 outbound links.

If it helps, think of a webpage having a set amount of “link juice.” Each outbound link on that page has to share the amount of “juice” with all the other links. So when you’re searching for sources for links, and you find one with a particularly high PR, you will want to pay attention to the number of outbound links. It may not be as good of a find as you think.

While these are pretty basic guidelines for those involved in link building, the beginner should make a conscious effort to remember them when building links. For those more experienced, a reminder is always a good thing.

Jaron A. has been heavily involved with SEO and Internet Marketing for over 7 years while running a successful SEO consulting company as well as promoting his own websites. You can read his tips and strategies as well as tools to help you in your link tracking efforts at BacklinkReporter.com

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