Link Quality Versus Link Quantity, Which Is Better?

By Author: John Tang
Total Articles: 512
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This is a great question, with a somewhat complex answer. First we have to explain the reasoning behind the question.

It is a fact, that search engines view a link to a website as a vote for the site. Now an even better "theory" is that a link from a web site of the same "subject" is a vote that counts more. That's is the Link Quality theory.

If your website in an industry, and another website in the same industry links to you, that is seen as giving better votes for you, than from someone outside the industry.

Example: A mortgage loan resource site links to a mortgage lender site. This a better link than from an auto parts website. In Theory, that is the case, and this is the information we are given by the web gurus.

But in reality this would mean only mortgage sites would link to mortgage site, and auto parts sites would link to auto parts sites. Then search engines would link to? Search engines? There is the underlying flaw in theory, which conflicts what actually happens. The competition does not link to each other! They are trying to defeat each other. But unfortunately ...
... the search engines still use the industry related vote as more high quality, it makes sense to some degree but what I want to discuss is if a non-related site linking to another non-related site is of less value that a "quality link".

It is stated that there this industry linking system does exist in some form when the "Google PageRank", for example is being calculated. And it does, but that doesn't mean that non-related links are not counted. In fact, if a quality site links to another site, which is not "worthy", for lack of a better term, the vote is still passed.

Even if the factor was 5 to 1, for every 5 non-related links equals 1 quality link. Which means you can play the game of either getting more quantity of quality. But I do know for a fact, and from experience that the ratio is not 5 to 1, it is more 1.25 to 1.

Now lets say we have a new site in a highly competitive industry such as mortgage for example, and need to get links to start ranking in the search engines. The competition is not certainly going to link to us. Nor are other related sites since we don't have any visible value for them to do so. What we have to do is manually build links through article directories, and link directory. That increasing the overall backlinks to the site, which in return will increase the ranking.

The simple fact that we are getting links from non-related industries, article writing and linking are not related to the "mortgage" industry, and that this is method is one of the most chosen method for gaining more inbound links, mean that in the battle of link quality versus link quantity, in this case Link Quantity Wins.

The quickest way for a site to gain inbound links is through building them on non-related links. The better way would be getting qualities links though. The best was is BOTH.

So how I would approach this task is get about 5,000 to 15,0000 inbound non-related links. Maybe even more if necessary. You will start seeing search engine traffic going up at this point, and then when your PageRank is good enough, or Alexa rank is high, ask for links from quality sites. They will see that you command some good numbers, if they have the right tools, and that will you on your way to becoming an authority in the industry.

This approach works, now some might argue that using non-related links will hurt you, I ask them how can it hurt you if you are receiving search engine traffic when you weren't before?

My simple conclusions that don't worry about whether a link is a quality link or not, getting an inbound link, is getting an inbound link. If it doesn't yield search engine traffic, you never know, it can yield some good regular surfing traffic. Not all people arrive on a website from the search engines, if you create an overall campaign to gain links, instead of just getting search engine traffic, you overall traffic will increase, as well as your search engine traffic.