It’s very important to differentiate between quantity and quality of backlinks. Both contribute to ranking factors. How? Well, it’s complicated, so let’s break it down.
If you ever hear an “SEO expert” promising X number of backlinks… run. Basing your SEO strategy solely on quantity of backlinks will likely result in your website being penalized by Google. That, or the links will simply be ignored. You will be wasting your money and digging yourself into a hole.
Quality of backlinks must also be considered. Again, you may hear “SEO experts” promising to provide backlinks with a minimum domain authority of 30 or higher. A higher domain authority doesn’t necessarily provide more value to your website than a lower domain authority. As long as the website isn’t spammy and the content has natural flow, then a backlink from a DA10 website can be just as valuable as a backlink from a DA30 website.
Never purchase backlinks or exchange links with another site. This violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Purchasing links can positively impact your site’s rankings in the short-run, but will very often hurt your site in the long-run. We see this when potential customers choose one of our competitors, based on a significantly lower price, only to see a spike in rankings, followed by a sudden drop-off.
A client came to us looking for SEO services. They told us that they were off to a good start because they had many backlinks. See image below:
Having 5900 backlinks and only 41 domains shows that this website has many backlinks that are coming from the same source, several times. Links are not measured with equally. Having one thousand backlinks from one website is not automatically better than one hundred backlinks from one hundred referring domains. Your website needs to acquire a sizable number of unique referring domains to get more traffic sources. See example below:
You’ve heard the saying before, “if it’s too good to be true it likely is”, and “you get what you pay for” and “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. All of those sayings apply to SEO. Good SEO takes time, and there’s no way around it.
Take your time building. Eventually, Google will reward your efforts of having good quality and high quantity backlinks.
There are no shortcuts. Google is a giant that can’t be fooled. So if you think you’ve found a way to rank quickly, think again.
If you need help getting your website ranked, give us a call at 305-4SEOFLY (305-473-6359). We’d be happy to provide you with a free website audit and discuss the necessary steps to getting your business ranked.
