Link building for SEO is critical to improving your ranking with major search engines. But what is more effective in improving your ranking, a large number of random links or fewer high quality links?
Most people know that incoming links are an important part
of improving your websites ranking, but should you focus your link building SEO
efforts on obtaining a large quantity of easily obtainable links from wherever
you can get them, or focus on obtaining high quality links that are typically
harder to get? Most link building
experts would agree that both quantity and quality are important, and in most
cases (although there are exceptions), any link to your website helps. However, because of the way Google and other
search engines value links, focusing your link building SEO efforts on quality
is more often than not the better choice.
So what makes a link a “quality link” and why is quality more important
than quantity?
To best understand why quality is more important than
quantity we need to see link building SEO from the perspective of Google. Google places a value on every website and
every webpage that it indexes. The most
famous measure of a website and webpage’s value is Google’s PageRank. Google assigns each webpage a ranking from 0
to 10 as a measure of its authority.
Webpages with a ranking of zero are typically very new and
insignificant. Webpages with a ranking
of ten carry an unprecedented amount of authority. An example of a webpage or website with a
rank or zero might be a new blog or a new small website for a pet store. An example of a PageRank of ten would be the
Google.com or usa.gov. Google considers
links that come from websites with a higher PageRank to be more important than
links that come from websites with a lower PageRank. However, it is important to understand that
Google’s 1 to 10 scale is not linear, rather the authority of a website
increases exponentially with each increase in PageRank. In other words, a website with a RageRank of
1 has approximately 10 times the authority of a website with a PageRank of 0,
but a website with a PageRank of 5 has approximately 100,000 the authority of a
website with a PageRank of 0. What this
means that one good link from a website with a PageRank of 5 can be much more
powerful than 100 or perhaps even 1,000 links from a website with a PageRank of
0.
In addition to PageRank there are several other
factors that determine the quality of a link and why focusing your link building seo efforts on obtaining quality links is more
important than focusing on quantity links.
Relevance of the link is perhaps the most important. If your website is about snowboarding than a
link to your website from another website that is about tropical fish isn’t
going to do you a whole lot of good. A
website about snowboarding needs links feeding it from other websites and
webpages that are also about snowboarding.
When examining a link Google looks at the surrounding text on the
webpage and the anchor text as a way to establish if that link comes from a
relevant source. The anchor text is the
text that contains the actual link itself.
So if Dr. Shred’s Snowboard Shop (fictions company) wants to rank high
in Google for the keyword search term “snowboarding gear” the link to Dr.
Shred’s website should come from a webpage about snowboarding gear and the
anchor text leading to www.drshreads.com that is clicked on should read
“snowboarding gear” rather than simply www.drshreds.com. Relevancy is why obtaining dozens or even
hundreds of links from irrelevant sources are not as effective in improving a
websites ranking as a few links from highly relevant sources.
