Aaliyah_Michigan
New Member
an excerpt from an interesting e-mail I got from linkpartners.com"Some webmasters seem to think that the more links you have pointing back to your homepage, the higher your ranking in the search engines. In reality, it is the quality and relevancy of the links pointing back to you, not the quantity of links that makes a difference. Furthermore, websites listed at the top of the search engines do not always have thousands of backlinks pointing to them. For example, go to everyone's favorite search engine and do a search for "Montana vacations." The #2 result has only 10 backlinks pointing to it. Considering there are 840,000 results for this search phrase, this is remarkable. Is the search engine broken? Not at all. Take a look at the websites linking back to #2, and you will see some good, quality, relevant websites. Simple proof that you do not need thousands of backlinks to rise to the top of the search engines.Think its a fluke? Do a search on the same search engine for "car audio parts." Out of over 3,150,000 websites, the #1 ranking site only has 18 backlinks pointing to it. Check out those 18 backlinks. They are some quality websites, with almost all of them directly related to the website searched on.Reciprocal linking should be thoughtful and intentional, and with your end users (not the search engines) kept in mind. If you request a link swap with another website for the sole purpose of "building up numbers" you are engaging in a task that is misguided. Remember the sample websites discussed above and always stay focused on quality, relevant websites for your links or resources pages."Just curious as to y'all think about this? I found it encouraging since I've really been searching and getting reciprocal links from very relevant sites over the past week or so.Same kind of thing we are talking about here:http://ozzu.com/other-google-information-and-resources/how-many-websites-need-have-pagerank-t23579.htmlWell, the quantity and quality are different criterias and I think both of them have their own place in google's algo.First of all, the quality of links represented in PageRank gives's your site some value. As we all know that value or PR that you gain doesn't automatically make your site rank high on your main keyphrases - there are too many other criterias for that. Also, there is a talk about Topic Sensitive PR and it makes sense to me - I don't say it is applied, but in a sertain way it has place and this is exactly the reason why people wan't to link to/from relative resources.Second, quantity - plays big role also. Than more links you have - than more exposure and referrals you get, its so simple. Also, if you look at the serps in most cases you'll see relevance between quality and quantity. Of course you need to think about the purpose of your linking before you do it. For example my site is about 2000 pages (Real Estate industry) and I have around 1500 links - its not very accurate right now because too many SEs were dropped and too many changes accured. Anyway, I have my wors competitor that has around 10K links. Google shows only 37 links to me and 400 links to my competitor. Although my competitor has only 100 pages indexed by google and I have 1250 indexed. You know what, they got penalized by Yahoo and they dropped on many phrases on Google. Also you need to remember that Google shows only sertain quality back links and not all of them, but google sure aware of all the links you have on indexed pages. So even having 400 good quality links comparing to 37 - doesn't make you #1 (although my links are no betther quality than my cometitors). I thinkg it has a lot to do with overdoing stuff if you don't have brains. Sure a lot depends on what do you do, what methods you use... I think linking quantity and quality depends on:1. the information your site is carying;2. the amount of indexed pages your site has;3. industry your site is in.For exapmle if you look at at real estate sites - most of them are single agents and brokers, some times teams with a few people.. good PR for real estate sites like that usually PR4 and 5. If you have 10K links to a site, you need to have higher PR and to lean towards authority site - what kind of authority site can have 100 pages??? You always can get an estimate of competition in your industry/direction and go from there. Hope that makes sense.Nice explaination and examples Gemini.If my English was better and I had more time I could write a whole article LOL