Link Building SEO - Quantity vs. Quality

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.