Importance of external links in 2018
-
How important are external links in 2018. How much of a percentage do they represent when deciding to rank a page.
I imagine it depends on the query but I was wondering it if 10 % of of 60 % ?
My feeling is that with good content you can get on almost any query on the 1 st page without links because that would be too penalising to small business if they had no possibility to rank with just content.
Looking forward to getting some feedback.
-
Thank you Chris for your input and information.
-
Basically, Google learned long ago that it couldn't exactly trust the (small, medium or large) business owner /marketer to be 100% truthful (or anything close) with the content they put on their own websites. More often then not, the marketer would include content that didn't match their products/service just to try to outdo their competitors or game google. (I know--it's hard to believe isn't it?)
Measuring backlinks became a way Google could get some third-party input on what a website might really be about as well as how much more important one site might be than another. In that measurement scheme, unfortunately, there is no handicap for new or small businesses, though I imagine if there was, every multinational in the world would be trying to figure out how they could make themselves look smaller or newer than they actually are. Of course, the link-measuring scheme was eventually gamed by marketers (we're just a bad lot, aren't we?) and Google began weighing other factors (as Nicholas links to) more heavily as a result.
Small businesses however, may get a foothold or survive in the keyword niches that don't support enough traffic for larger companies. It takes less authority (though usually just as good optimization) to rank for those niche keywords, so while a new or local company is pulling itself up by the bootstraps to get itself established, they are usually best off targeting those more locally-oriented and long-tail keywords than the more competitive ones.
-
Thank you for the info, I agree with you low competition it is easy to rank without link more competitive query harder without.
I will check moz link explorer as I know there is a new version and I haven't time to check it out yet.
-
Agreed, we see that all the time for locally competitive searches. We recommend utilizing the Moz Link Explorer to do a link profile comparison between your website & a website that is ranking high for one of the target keywords that you are not. 9 times out of 10, they will have more authoritative, relevant links.
-
This depends greatly on the search query and what keywords you are targeting, for example, if you are writing an article on "how to eat chocolate covered bananas in outer space", you can probably rank your page on the 1st spot of Google with 0 links, even with a sub-par written article. However, the higher the competition, the more high-quality links are going to matter in my experience.
According to Google's Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the top 3 Google ranking factors- https://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882. Good content definitely comes before acquiring links, process-wise, but I believe links are just as important when it comes to ranking for competitive searches.
We will never know an exact percentage, but if already have great, in-depth, well-written content, act like links are 40-50% of the ranking equation & your efforts will be closer to being on-target than they are off.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Fix broken external links on noindex, follow pages no one visits?
Would you take the time to fix external links on your site on pages that are noindex, follow on pages that no one ever visits? The only reason to do it would be to present a tidier site to Google, but would it really care if those pages are noindex/folllow? The thing that makes it a non-trivial amount of work is that there are hundreds of these on a large site. Do you think Google cares, if they're noindex/follow? I know the safe answer is always fix everything, but really it has to get weighed against the likely benefit and other projects with a limited amount of time to work with. Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How to build links to landing pages?
I have been using link baits like infographics to get quality links to my site and I have observed that these tactics are great to get links to the home page or that particular post page where infographic was originally posted. But we have various other important landing pages and we want to transfer some link equity to those pages. Whenever we publish an infographic we post it on out blog with an embed code carrying anchor text pointed to our site’s home page. People who share our infographic, normally links to the home page or to the post page where they find that particular item. So, what are the possible ways to get links to any other landing page? Can we post some bait on other landing pages as well. I need to know some more techniques to attract deep links. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaz_lhr1 -
Is this link being indexed?
link text Deadline: Monday, Sep 30, 2013 link text I appreciate the help guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswalkerson0 -
OSE Confusion on 'External' Links
Hello All, I am still very new to this but am starting to get a grasp of things in the SEO world, but there are still a few things that I just don't get yet. For example, I've been trying to find out a great strategy for Link Building, what better way than looking at already existing SEO companies? So I did a quick search on a website (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.springer-marketing.co.uk) and tried to look at all of the External incoming links. So I did a filter of Followed+301, Only External and all subdomains. But about 20 of the links for this site are coming from itself. Now, i'm not an expert, but presumably you can't just give yourself strong links? Is this some kind of trick, how or why would somebody do this? Mind Blows Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Natural Link Profile, low and high value links, really?
I cant really get my head around this one. I've read a few times when building links make sure you pick up so low value links as well. So here is an example (and lets say each link takes half hour to get): I got 5 hours of link building and this is what I have managed to get with the time. 1. 10 high value links all with PA/DA 50-60+ 2. 5 high value links with PA/DA 50-60+ AND another 5 low value links with PA/DA 10-. Surely #1 beats #2 hands down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Link anchor text: only useful for pages linked to directly or distributed across site?
As a SEO I understand that link anchor text for the focus keyword on the page linked to is very important, but I have a question which I can not find the answer to in any books or blogs, namely: does inbound anchor text 'carry over' to other pages in your site, like linkjuice? For instance, if I have a homepage focusing on keyword X and a subpage (with internal links to it) focusing on keyword Y. Does is then help to link to the homepage with keyword Y anchor texts? Will this keyword thematically 'flow through' the internal link structure and help the subpage's ranking? In a broader sense: will a diverse link anchor text profile to your homepage help all other pages in your domain rank thematically? Or is link anchor text just useful for the direct page that is linked to? All views and experiences are welcome! Kind regards, Joost van Vught
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoostvanVught0 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0