The Two Biggies of SEO?

By: Jarred Dee | Posted: 21st May 2006

  I am not a SEO(search engine optimization) expert but I have done my reading. Like me if you read anything about SEO you will probably come to the same conclusions as I have. While there are a lot of different things you can do to help the ranking of your site, there are two biggies that are usually stressed as the most important. The first of the two is content. That means to get as much relevant, useful, content as possible on your site, and then when you have a substantial amount, add some more everyday. The second biggie of SEO is getting relevant links pointing to your site on other high ranking pages. The articles lead me to believe that doing these two thing may be the difference between success and failure.

  Being the skeptic that I am I decided to test what I was reading on the web to see if the amount of content and number of backlinks are in truth important factors in the search engines rankings. The test that I ran is in no way all inclusive and should in now way be considered absolute, but rather hopefully it can give a bit clearer picture of the importance that search engines (specifically Google) give these two "biggies".

  First I wanted measure the amount of content that a higher ranking sites contain, and then compare them to the amount found on a lower ranking sites. To do this I choose the fairly broad term "mountain bike" and then filtered out all the non-homepage results (i.e. such as about.com). I then recorded how many pages each site had indexed with Google (using the "site:" operator), The top 10 rankings in the Google results had an average of around 71,732 pages of content. Google rankings 50 through 59 had an average of 6300 indexed pages, and the 100th to 109th averaged 4584 pages per site. True that the amount of pages of a site indexed by Google is not a perfect indication of how much content is actually found on a site, but I assume there has to be at least a little correlation to the amount of content a site has and how many pages it has published.

  Now lets take a look at the backlinks for those same pages. Using same basic method as above I recorded the number of backlinks as recorded by Google (using the Link: operator) for the top ten results for the search term "Mountain Bike" The top ten sites on google had an average of 2478 backlinks per site. The 50th through the 59th rank had an average of 162
backlinks per site. and finally the 100th-109th place averages only 57 backlinks.

  It would seem to me like all those SEO articles floating around are on to something. On average it does appear that the more content and backlinks your site has the higher rank in Google search listings it will receive. some of you are probably saying well no duh. But alas the skeptic in me now feels better knowing that the hours spent trying to find quality backlinks to my sites are well spent.

  Something peculiar with the data I recorder was that one of the sites in the top ten had fewer links than those ranked up near the 100th position. A number of conclusions can be drawn from this but one that seems pretty logical is that Google does not count all backlinks as equal. No real surprise here for if you read what Google has to say about their "Pagerank" technology you would come to the same conclusion. So its seems that it is not necessarily the number of backlinks but also the quality of those links that count.

   As you search around looking for a good place to get a quality backlink you might want to stop by www.infobrink.com I started this site a while back with the idea of providing not only an easy way for users to get a backlink to their site, but also a way that they could make it a "quality" backlink. The Infobrink directory is unique in that it allows you to submit a short article and place your link in the text of the article. It's free and painless and can get a link to your site placed alongside content specifically tailored to your site within minutes.

  I've included in a table below the results of my "experiment" so you can draw any further conclusions as you like. You can also conduct your own experiment on almost any search engine by using the "site:www.sitename.com" operator and the "link:www.sitename.com" operator.

Search term "Mountain Bikes"

Google Rank	# of Indexed Pages	# of Backlinks
1	488000	16600
2	13400	292
3	115	252
4	24200	2200
5	21000	74
6	686	232
7	22100	2250
8	588	533
9	223	327
10	147000	1750

50	59	13
51	22500	298
52	188	83
53	971	22
54	16200	192
55	763	520
56	333	164
57	673	43
58	21300	263
59	18	21

100	95	18
101	22300	157
102	395	36
103	143	31
104	3	8
105	22200	28
106	293	56
107	81	10
108	207	208
109	126	18

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Tags: google, important factors, search engine optimization, search engines rankings, truth, conclusions, relevant links, success and failure, skeptic, seo search engine optimization, google results, different things, correlation, biggie, mountain bike, biggies