How Many Backlinks Are Enough? Advanced Backlinking

This article explores backlinks in more detail and is in response to questions posed by SandyBeachGuy and southerngirl09 over on Infobarrel.  Thanks for the great questions that push me to research and explain.

I’m not going to recover the material you can read in these posts:

What is a Backlink?

What are Bookmarking Sites and How To Use Bookmarking Sites

A Beginners Guide to Top Traffic Sources

Beginners Guide to PageRank and Follow vs No Follow Attributes-Do They Matter to You?

You can also check out this forum thread for a really long list of bookmarking sites.

How Many Backlinks Are Enough?  Running for Mayor

This depends on a number of factors.  Backlinks are basically votes for your webpage or website.

Say you want to become Mayor of small town population 1500.  Deduct the kids and you might have 1000 voters.  Half of those eligible will not vote. So the entire universe of voters you need to worry about is 500 people.  If you just have one person to run against you need 251 votes to win.  One vote will be yours and you can count on your family for a few more. More votes should come from friends and co-workers. Other votes may come from people you don’t know well but who read about your track record and like you enough to cast a ballet for you.

In a 5 person race you don’t even need 1/2 the votes to win, just more then anyone else.  No big budget needed. Pretty easy to get elected Mayor right?

In contrast, say you want to become Mayor of New York City.  You’ll need millions of votes and it’s going to take millions of dollars to reach the voters and out-compete everyone else who might like to be Mayor of New York City. Your own vote and votes of your family and friends are not going to get you very far.

Like running for Mayor, the competition decides how many votes or backlinks are enough.

How to Measure Competition

The first page of Google is all that really matters.  Look at the results for your keyword and gag how hard they are going to be to beat.   If you see home pages of big sites coming up you have no chance with that keyword phrase.  If you see blog posts, forum threads, niche sites, and revenue sharing site posts on page one you have a decent chance of ranking.

Getting a little more technical, you can check the number of reported backlinks and PageRank of these sites that rank well for the search term.  Remember that not all backlinks will report and different tools will report different numbers of backlinks, and some backlinks are a lot stronger then others, so the count is just a rough guide.

How Many Backlinks are Usually Enough?

No one knows how to even measure the number of webpages out there, but we know the number is growing fast. The vast majority of these webpages (not websites) have ONE or ZERO links pointed at them and are nearly impossible to find with search engines.

A properly structured blog or a revenue sharing website builds in internal linking. Add some RSS feeds and posts of the URL to Facebook and Twitter and your article or blog post is far ahead of most webpages.

If you have a long enough keyword phrase it is pretty easy to get to the top of the SERPs because there is no competition. However, if  you are going for a more competitive keyword, you’ll need to get more votes.

The Best Backlinks

Creating great content that is engaging, helpful and causes other people to link to your article is the best way to attract backlinks. We call this organic backlinks.  If you write a really useful post bloggers and forum posters will link to it as they find it and want to share it.

However, some topics are just not going to get organic backlinks (an article like Max and Ruby Books is just not exciting enough to get organic links) so you may decide to manufacture the links.

Where to Create Backlinks

• Social bookmarking
• Social media
• External blog posts or articles (there are several backlinks in this post)
• Internal links between pages
• Comments on blogs
• Forum links and signatures

When and How to Create Backlinks

Over time is best using a variety of methods.  Think about how an organic link profile develops.  As bloggers, forum posters and bookmarking site members discover your great content they link to:

• At random times and dates
• From different types of sites.
• With great targeted anchor text using your keyword like Passive Income Blog, and with untargeted anchor text like “here“.
• With raw URLs like http://innovativepassiveincome.com
• With both do follow and nofollow links
• From high PR sites and low ones.
• Sometimes to the homepage and sometimes deep linking to specific content
• From pages with related content and from pages with unrelated content
• From a diversity of domains – not always the same three places

So the most convincing backlink manufacturing strategy is a combination of backlinks from different places in different forms.

Is Manufacturing Backlinks Cheating?   

It depends on the scale.  I have certain pillar posts that I like to link to regularly, including some linked in this article. It is very natural to point my readers to these few webpages out of the hundreds of pages I control because I think they are useful pages.  Natural self promotion and linking of your own work is well within the figuring out what is important using the idea of PageRank that Google was designed around.

However, if I went out and created thousands of backlinks from irrelevant or computer generated pages, or created tons of spam blog and forum comments, that is very unnatural and outside what the search engines want to see.  Black hat backlinking gets punished and white hat backlinking gets rewarded.  The search engines devote huge resources to determining the difference.