Thread: 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.

I would get a high quality relevant link over a hundred links from non descriptive sites. Also I prefer permanent links over short-term linksas that is one criteria I look for when building links for my sites.

higher quality is better

I have little but quality backlinks and my site performance is good.

Quality Work is more important for me.......

In the end relevance is still what matters in google's algorithm, like we all know quality is better than quantity. So getting links from sites that are trusted by google is a good way.

Both Quality and Quantity matters but the most important things id the relevancy of the website from where you are getting backlink.

Both are require. But i think the quality is more important then Quantity, See If you are doing forum posting and Putting your Keyword as a signature.You have 2 options
First create number of thread in low PR forums,
or give some reply in high PR forum
I think the second one is easy and giving more benefits.

I believe one quality link equals maybe 10-20 crappy ones. But hey, in the end, a link is a link, no?

[QUOTE=ashtonfarell;2259]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.[/QUOTE]



Useful information you have shared with us.From my point of view Quality is more important and useful than quantity.because your website get high rank and good positioning in search engine because of quality back links which you have achieve through forum posting, blog commenting and directory submission.

Quality and Quantity is always a debate here in our office. But i think it should be equal to produce a good out put and good SERP position.

I have seen my page getting PR3 with only one relevant and high quality link!

1 quality backlink can be equivalent to a thousands of poor backlinks...
but it would be better if you will have a quantity of quality backlinks

[B]Quality[/B] and [B]Relevancy[/B] matters most.

One can simply analyze here;

[url]http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pagerank-10-sites.htm[/url]

What most people think is that getting links from high PR website means quality website link. But this is comeltely wrong..

Quality is most important!

Quality is vital, but you need to be broad, spread your net wide.

From my experience, free directory links on free for all sites are worthless.
Sites like Pligg are pretty awful too, although there are some OK ones.

The problem with any link from a low quality site is longevity. If you submit links to low quality directories expect 90% of them to be gone in 3 years. People build directories in the hope of making a fortune and when they realise it is not working, they abandon them, then the domain expires. But, if you are lucky some may become a good resource. But then you have the dilemma of how wide to spread that net - too wide and get Google slapped, not wide enough and not catch enough fish to last.

Quality links from quality sites is better simply because if the site is doing well, it will probably be there still in 5 years or more. If it is an article link then there is a good chance it will remain. Blogroll links etc. get reviewed and updated, so you need to keep building those.

Honestly, putting all your eggs in one basket is too risky in my opinion.

Quality links are vital and if I could get them as easily as low quality links, I would sell the method and make millions. Lol. But seriously, quality links are difficult to acquire [I]especially[/I] if you have standards of [B]both[/B] relevancy and high pr. So if your site is depending on only a couple quality links, and one of them decides to drop you or change the links to nofollow, you will feel the affect more than someone who invested in both quality and lower quality sites. Every link helps. This is also assuming the links are not coming from spam sites. However, even search engines don't completely punish you for having those links unless all of your backlinks are from farming sites.

The biggest issue with low quality links is the longevity, content aside (which has been mentioned). But this really shouldn't be a huge issue considering that at this point of the SEO game, link building is a never ending process. Just because we get a few great links, it doesn't mean that we just stop what we've been doing. Because honestly, with the amount of competition out there, you can assume that a competitor is going to catch up or out do you.

Thanks for you sharing.

I think every one knows that the quality is big matter for getting a good ranking of keywords but in real it is too difficult to gather a quality links. Some webmaster they believe in quality & quantity both because they try to get quantity link & from this links they will find quality links.