The importance of inbound links never seems to stop confusing me. SEO types will tell you that it’s one of the most important thing Google looks for when ranking your sites. I’m not going to argue with this, but I have a couple sites that seem to be bucking the trend and it’s strange.
My new Beijing site hasn’t even been finished yet. All of the pages work but there are huge gaps where there should be content and it’s pretty messy in general. I haven’t done any meta tags at all for any pages and haven’t put links to it from any site besides this one. So when I opened my 103 Bees account to check on my other sites I was surprised to see my Beijing site ranking on the first page of Google for several competitivesearch terms.
Then I’ve got another site that exists purely to push affiliate links and it has miraculously found itself as a PR5! I’ve always thought inbound links were the key to getting a good Page Rank so I’m baffled again. This site doesn’t have any inbound links that I know of besides the usual connection to the rest of my websites. I’ve certainly never gone on a link building mission. Plus the content is crap at best.
Looking at two of my best sites, things become even more confusing. Stuck in London had a PR4 at the beginning of the year but has since fallen to PR0 for reasons unknown. It’s always done well with Google as far as rankings are concerned, but has been forgotten when it comes to PR. I know this site has some good inbound links and has been Stumbled a few times too which probably means there are links out there that I don’t even know about. Then there’s my working holidays site. That one has a decent PR and currently does well in the SERPS, but it took about six months to even show up in Google, despite putting a lot of effort into link building.
I am as confused as ever but one thing I am kind of, sort of, sure of is that the quality of inbound links is far more important than the quantity. I think a few links from some old, trusted sites that Google ranks well in th SERPS is better than hundreds of link swaps, submissions to article sites, forum signatures, blog comments and whatever other ways people use to build links.
What do you think? Do you have any sites that do well in the SERPS or PR worlds without having put any effort at all into building links?
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