2 Backlink Myths Busted!

When people start speculating, there is just no logical end to it. Be it stock markets or search engine optimization, speculations only manage to confuse gullible people instead of helping them! Speaking of SEO, there are way too many myths prevailing on backlink building and SEO in general that I would better start writing an ebook on them!

Perhaps the funniest thing is that such myths are more often than not mere figments of imagination of those who hardly know a thing about the topic! In this article I will bust two such myths.

1. Myth 1 – You need to keep adding content to your website to maintain its search engine rankings: Utter falsehood! You can not only get good rankings for your website but even maintain those rankings WITHOUT adding content regularly! I have so many websites that I have not touched for years, and their rankings only get better with time! Guess what is the secret?

Instead of adding content, I focus more on a building backlinks.

Now, I am not asking you to stop putting content on your website. Content, quality content that is, is what attracts visitors to your website and makes them stick around and buy your stuff. When people see quality content on your website,  they would instantly perceive you as an expert in that niche, which in turn would help build trust between you and your prospects.

Once your prospects start trusting you, they would not hesitate to buy whatever you have put together, provided of course that you are selling quality products!

My point is that, saying that one MUST keep adding content every day or week to their website in order to maintain its rankings is stupid! If anything, you should keep building backlinks for your website instead!

Lastly, here is a fact that I bet would jerk you from your seat – I have seen even the worst websites dominating the first page of Google by sheer virtue of backlinks. I am speaking of  sites that contain very little content except whatever is scrapped through RSS feeds from other sites, and of course Adsense ads! While I neither build nor recommend building such sites, I am telling this to you in order to illustrate the power of backlinks over content!

2. Myth 2 – You need a lot of backlinks to get any decent rankings on search engines: Yet another baseless myth on search engine optimization. If you thought there is no end to your backlink building exercise, you are dead wrong! There is always an end to a process, and backlink building, being a process, is no exception either!

How many backlinks you would need to build for your website would naturally depend on your niche market’s competition. The more competitive your niche is, the more backlinks you would need in order to push your website to the first page of Google!

I will give you some hypothetical figures here to illustrate my point:

If you are marketing in the mainstream "weight loss" niche, you may need to build, say 250 backlinks for your site in total. On the other hand, if you are marketing in a sub niche such as "weight loss for moms", then just 50-100 backlinks might suffice! Remember that these are just hypothetical figures, but I hope they would give you an idea of how many backlinks you need to build for a certain site.

All said and done, if anyone told you that you have to build 10,000 backlinks to get your website ranked on the first page of Google, they are wrong! In case of backlinks, what really matters is quality and not quantity.

Don’t believe me? Try submitting a batch of articles to 1000s of low quality article directories, and then submit another batch of unique articles to only the top quality directories. The results would be before your eyes within less than 2-3 months!  

Similarly, getting 100 backlinks from sites averaging between 6-8 PR (PR here stands for Pagerank btw) is far better than garnering 1000 links from PR 1-2 websites!