One of the more crucial factors in getting a site to rank well on search engines that is often overlooked by webmaster is the process of link acquisition. A site that has people linking to it will not only generate traffic from people coming from the sites that are linking to it, but it will also appear more authoritative and trustworthy by Google. Thus, it will rank better than it’s competitors with fewer links.
Not to say that a site can rank for a keyword solely based on how many links it has, content is still the #1 factor in determining what keywords a site will show up for in search results. However, the main purpose of acquiring links to a site is to make it rank higher in the field in which it is already established. This is often referred to as link authority or Google pagerank.
How Links Affect Pagerank
Google’s pagerank measurement tool is a feature embedded in the popular Google toolbar which rates a site’s authority on a scale of 1 to 10. There have been many attempts by people outside the Googleplex to determine just exactly how many links one needs in order to achieve a certain pagerank. Below is a table that illustrates an estimation of how many links you might need to achieve a certain pagerank.
By looking at the chart at left we can see that in order to achieve a pagerank of 5, a site would (in theory) need 555 links from sites with a pagerank of 3 or as few as 3 links from sites with a pagerank of 6. Thus we can conclude that not only is it good for a site to have a large quantity of links, but that it is also helpful if the sites linking are of a high pagerank themselves.
Aside from that, search engines are also concerned that sites are receiving links from a variety of sources. For example, if a Real Estate website has 100 links pointing to it that are all from twitter profiles, it might appear that a spammer is at work trying to promote the site. However, if a competing Real Estate site has 10 links pointing to it from sources such as a chamber of commerce website, an associate’s real estate blog, a home finder directory, etc… it will always rank higher than the site with 100 spammy links all from the same source.
Link Diversity
SEO guru Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ gave an excellent presentation this week on the importance of link diversity and how it affects your site.
Here at envoca, we make it a top priority to make our client’s sites appear as authoritative and trustworthy as possible so that they can rank high in search results. One of the services we provide is “SEO overhauls” for existing websites that need to be revamped in order to generate more traffic from Google. If you would like to know what we can do to make your site get more search traffic feel free to contact us by email or give us a call.
This article is making me think that my current SEO company might be doing things a little fishy.
Is there any way for me to tell how many people are linking to my site?
@Miguel
Yes, there are several ways. The easy way is simply to type into the search bar at Google or Yahoo the text “link:www.example.com” where example is your site’s url.
Yahoo will usually show a higher number because Google only shows a sample of the links to your site.
I’ve been looking around for articles similar to this but never found one that actually was valuable such as this. Glad I found this place!
Great read, we need more info like this most site just say build links but you explain it here.
@Tony There are several shady things SEO companies do unfortunately regarding link building. I have noticed paid links, yahoo PPC accounts as common ways to get links, or links the SEO company controls. The key is to have sustainable growth with the linking.
I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success in your business.
Thanks for the post. I appreciate it. You have a very well-done website.
Solid post. Any tips on how to get people to link to your site (obviously besides good content) lol
@Kyle,
That’s a good question and the answer could possibly be another blog post that I’ll be writing sometime in the future.
The fact is that this topic has been covered hundreds of times before on other SEO blogs. The crazy thing is that new ways of getting links to you site are popping up constantly and there are already older methods that continue to be effective. For now I’d recommend checking out these articles below and I’ll have to tweet you if I end up writing a post about it myself.
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-actually-get-links-from-your-linkbait
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/marketing/online-marketing/10-steps-to-getting-links-to-your-site.aspx#stepstogettinglinkstoyoursite
These articles are of utmost importance but can u please tell me of some automated software that could make links to my blog automatically…!
Hrmm that was weird, my comment got eaten. Anywho I wanted to say that it’s nice to know that someone else also touched on this as I had trouble finding the same information elsewhere. This was the first place that helped me understand this. Thanks.