How Many Links Do You Need?

There was a time when people set goals to get hundreds of links a month to their website. This was typically done with special automated link pages, using the reciprocal linking strategy. People hired SEO specialists to build links for them, they signed up for reciprocal linking services, purchased links, and even started hitting the ‘Free for All Link’ sites again.

This frenzy of link gathering may have helped to boost their rankings for a little while, but it certainly didn’t help them in anyway in the long-term. Search engines caught on, and this is no longer an acceptable practice.

Link popularity was once measured by the number of links that you had. Today, the search engines are still slightly interested in how many links you have, but they place a great deal of importance on the quality of the links you have, and the number of links that you have really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you have quality links.

For example, let’s imagine that there are two sites that target the same keyword, and each has quality original content. Both sites have followed all of the ‘white-hat’ SEO techniques, and the only real difference between the two sites, in terms of SEO techniques, is that Site A has a thousand inbound links from a variety of sites. Some of the sites have nothing to do with the topic that Site A covers. Others are from sites that have page ranks lower than five. Two or three of the links are from authority sites, with page ranks of five or higher.

Site B, on the other hand, only has 20 inbound links. Now, you might think that Site A would easily win that popularity contest, and rank higher in the search results than Site B. But Site B would actually rank higher, because every one of those 20 inbound links is coming from an authority site, with a page rank of five or better. Site B will not only rank higher, but the owner of Site B didn’t have to do nearly as much work as the owner of Site A - for a better result.

Remember, how many people you know doesn’t count nearly as much as whom you know in the world of link building. Don’t worry about the numbers for the most part - worry about the quality.

You will have the numbers - over time - which is what the search engines prefer (slow link building), but when you have those numbers, the majority of the links pointing to your site will be quality links, and they will all be naturally placed, instead of forced. The search engines are going to love you and your site!