Jun 18 2008
Accidental SEO - How Important are Inbound Links?
The importance of inbound links never seems to stop confusing me. SEO types will tell you that it’s one of the most important thing Google looks for when ranking your sites. I’m not going to argue with this, but I have a couple sites that seem to be bucking the trend and it’s strange.
My new Beijing site hasn’t even been finished yet. All of the pages work but there are huge gaps where there should be content and it’s pretty messy in general. I haven’t done any meta tags at all for any pages and haven’t put links to it from any site besides this one. So when I opened my 103 Bees account to check on my other sites I was surprised to see my Beijing site ranking on the first page of Google for several competitivesearch terms.
Then I’ve got another site that exists purely to push affiliate links and it has miraculously found itself as a PR5! I’ve always thought inbound links were the key to getting a good Page Rank so I’m baffled again. This site doesn’t have any inbound links that I know of besides the usual connection to the rest of my websites. I’ve certainly never gone on a link building mission. Plus the content is crap at best.
Looking at two of my best sites, things become even more confusing. Stuck in London had a PR4 at the beginning of the year but has since fallen to PR0 for reasons unknown. It’s always done well with Google as far as rankings are concerned, but has been forgotten when it comes to PR. I know this site has some good inbound links and has been Stumbled a few times too which probably means there are links out there that I don’t even know about. Then there’s my working holidays site. That one has a decent PR and currently does well in the SERPS, but it took about six months to even show up in Google, despite putting a lot of effort into link building.
I am as confused as ever but one thing I am kind of, sort of, sure of is that the quality of inbound links is far more important than the quantity. I think a few links from some old, trusted sites that Google ranks well in th SERPS is better than hundreds of link swaps, submissions to article sites, forum signatures, blog comments and whatever other ways people use to build links.
What do you think? Do you have any sites that do well in the SERPS or PR worlds without having put any effort at all into building links?
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go. 
Definately, Google is drunk lately. I have one strong, authority site with tens of thousands of backlinks that only has a PR 4 and with 5k or so, at the time of my update, I got a PR 5 on my travel blog. I don’t think there were any quality links at that time to brag about.
PR on the whole baffles me and in fact, I have yet to be convinced that it is as important as touted. Granted, the “experts” for the most part are in highly competitive niches - MMO, IM, SEO, financial services and the like - so maybe PR means a lot to them.
I have an uncle who has had a website up since Al Gore invented the internet - his site is #3 of 3.6 million pages when searching for a keyword that his site targets - and his PR is 3 - the site in #4 has a PR of 5 and according to what I know about SEO - looks pretty good for the keyword.
I do know that any update to my crappy blogspot blog (PR3 ~20 backlinks), which really only exists so I haven’t got to explain to my parents how to download email attachments, is indexed on google almost immediately - if I put a link to a new site on that blog BAM! google indexes the linked site.
Oddly, my main site which has no PR yet ranks high for “baggage surcharge” - surely there are several older, trusted sites that were much quicker to break the news on new surcharges that my commentary on the subject should have been all but muted to google, but I get a steady stream (well trickle) of traffic for the term??
so…my observation is that backlinks from a “trusted” site will get you indexed - whether or not lots of backlinks help you in the serps or with PR is a mystery to me. I think there is a lot about google that is to remain a mystery.
I always reckon they throw in a ‘random’ factor in the toolbar PR, There are just too many instances where it doesn’t make sense.
Without actually checking out the sites in question I would suggest that you are building sites nicely enough that they are very crawlable, so a single link is enough to bring the bot in. Good work
Stuck In London - isn’t that one you are selling links on and *gasp* telling us about same? They have probably spotted you at it and ‘removed your ability to pass PR’ (which greybars the toolbar PR). The solution would be to nofollow the paid links, dig through the site for *anything* else you can think of that might be violating the google guidelines and then drop a contrite reinclusion request at webmaster console.
I have no idea how PR works but I feel like it means nothing as I’ve seen popular sites with low PR and low traffic sites with high PR……
I’d say your London site has definitely been slapped for paid links: follow the advice to get re-included though one of my blogs is still out in the cold over this issue. PR is unrelated to traffic : except that my Pr3 site does get 3 visitors on a slow news day ! Links appear very important though everyone has a slightly different take on the details. Have you managed to find a gap in the market with your beijing site? I can get posts indexed and 2 or 3 out of a 100,000 odd competition - but only if I post about topical events
One of the first things I learned about ranking high in the search engines and making money on the internet is that you need as many and as high quality inbound links as possible to do well. So I’ve never really challenged this theory as it has worked out pretty well for me so far. This isn’t to say that I’ve proven or disproven it, because I’ve never built a site without trying to get as many links as possible.
I definitely don’t put too much stock into Google PR, it’s how you do in the SERPs that is really important. And these two don’t seem very closely related at all in most instances. In any case, I would agree with you that 10 high quality links from established sites is better than say 20 poor quality links.
Didn’t problogger and those folks lose some PR earlier this year because of selling text links? Might be the same thing.
I wonder if google is just shaking things up a bit because people have gotten good at figuring out the “formula”. Sounds like it has benefited you, on one site.
I’m still in the sandbox, I suspect.
Links are one of the best ways to market online as they are the road that leads to your content.
When building links, keep in mind some of the basic principles of marketing. Will your desired target market see the links and be enticed enough to make the journey? Will the link placement add to your site’s branding?
In that regard I hold link building in high regard. I don’t value link exchanges much though. The reason is that your exchanged link tends to get put on a low valued link page that will rarely be visited. I don’t know about everyone else, but I would much rather have my link directly in an article on a related subject.
I also find that leaving comment signatures on blogs related to your site is helpful. For a short time when the article is at the top of the blog and being read, it generates some traffic.
of course none of this is directly related to SEO. It helps and is generally in line with it, but I recommend doing activities that will benefit you in additional ways aside from just SEO, while keeping the general SEO concept in mind… you could spend hours cramming meta data into a page or you could write a couple more niche pages of content…
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Gustafson
http://www.TheViewFromHome.com
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I think you almost always need inbound links. One exception was a site I built several years ago; a very niche blog built when I knew almost nothing about blogging and the importance of inbound links and relationships with other bloggers. The site still has a pr of 4 and the only reason I still pay hosting fees is because one post (very very specific) brings in enough traffic to cover the fees. Of 110 posts; 1 post is the one that brings 75 pageviews a day and now has over 200 comments.
I’ve found that incomming links are one of the most important aspects in creating a higher PR. That and SEO ranking, but that is a lot more intangible.
I reckon the Google algorithms have become a lot more sophisticated over time. Link quality is no longer just static (i.e. determined by PR of the linking page) but dynamic, i.e. also determined by the relevance of the link for the actual search keywords. There are ways to guess the relevance, like anchor text or main topics of the linking page/site.
This explains why sometimes high PR links seem to not have any effect at all. Or why some sites beat high PR pages in the SERPs even for competetive keywords.
I don’t really know what any of this technical stuff means (yet), but I would like to say that your Web sites are very well organized and informative. I’m just starting my blog, and I’m trying to organize my thoughts and interests into a full-fledged Web site. Your sites and your insight on the marketing side of the Internet will be very helpful to a beginner like me. Fantastic work!