The Dollar Factory

Why you should stop worrying about link building and focus on producing content

It has become some kind of disease for people entering the online game spending most of their time worrying about link building in order to improve their search engine ranking. I understand and know very well that the best traffic a site can receive is one delivered by the search engines. For a few years now, Google has dominated the search engine market and anyone who has been running a website for a while would know that Google brings over 85% of organic search traffic. So let us focus on Google.

People searching for information on Google often never go past the first couple of pages of results. In fact, most people rarely go past the first page. Since Google displays 10 results per page unless a website ranks in the top 20 (and preferably top 10) then it won’t get much attention. So, how to get to the top 10?

Most people have heard by now that Google ranks websites based on an algorithm devised by Google’s founders when they were still in graduate school. The algorithm computes a number called PageRank (PR) for every site. The larger a site’s PR the more important the algorithm thinks it is and as long as its content is semantically relevant to a user’s query then it appears higher in the search engine results. PR is computed by counting the number of links back to the site simulating a democratic World Wide Web based on the idea that the most important sites will be linked the most by other sites. So, webmasters and SEO experts spent much time trying to improve PR in hopes to outrank everybody else and hit the top 10 in the search engines. So everybody is always trying to generate as many backlinks as possible. Unfortunately, they soon realize that hundreds and even thousands of backlinks that require working for hours every day do not generate improved rankings in Google. So, what is going on?

The problem is that people are missing the bigger picture. First of all, nobody really know how Google computes PR. The work originally published by the Google founders describing the algorithm is now outdated and you can be certain that all those PhDs that Google has hired have greatly modified and improved the original algorithm. This updated version has not been published and nobody other than Google engineers knows how it works. In addition, Google has made it clear that PR is only one parameter out of hundreds (if not thousands – I can’t remember) of parameters that Google uses to rank sites. What those other parameters are we do not know and it is stupid to think that the output of a machine learning algorithm with so many parameters can be estimated with knowledge of only one of them. Finally, Google semantically analyzes a site’s content in order to understand its meaning and relate it to a particular keyword that is searched for. Semantic analysis algorithms are not very good so unless a site’s topic is easy for a software agent to understand then Google will never rank it well.

In other words, creating a site with random text and 1,000,000 backlinks will get zero traffic from Google and that is a fact! The time people waste trying to get as many backlinks as possible could be better spent on creating unique and interesting content. The more of such content a site has the more likely people will link to it and the number of backlinks will increase by default possibly improving the site’s ranking on Google.

The important lesson here is that content is what a webmaster’s focus should be. Let me say that once more. If you want to succeed online then focus on creating unique and interesting content instead of wasting your time trying to artificially increase the backlink count.