Inbound Links: SEO Steroids
Posted on | July 6, 2010 | No Comments
Recently, the folks over at SEOmoz had a Whiteboard Friday blog post where they documented the strength a few inbound links might have for a website.
While being an avid SEOmoz schmoozer (I don’t post on their blog, I don’t leave comments either, and I use the free tools) I do however follow SEOmoz and their founder/sail hoister Rand Fishkin on Twitter so as to stay up to date on what they’re doing and their perceptions of the ever changing world-wide-web.
They published the aforementioned Whiteboard Friday post with a very handy and informative video. In it they document the Google rankings of a website for a specific/particular search term before any inbound links have been acquired and then compare the rankings after an inbound link or two has been purchased.
The results, quite expectedly, proved the value of inbound links to a website’s success in terms of search rankings: the site went from literal search engine alienation to ranking ~30-40 within days of the link acquisition(s).
Now, SEOmoz is not an advocate of buying links, nor am I, and they quickly removed the purchased link(s) for this experiment after getting the results documented. Google‘s Matt Cutts most assuredly points out that buying links is like playing search ranking Russian roulette with a howitzer. If you buy links and get caught, it is very much a death sentence in terms of a website being found in Google. There are a wide array of debates as to how Google can determine sites that purchase links from those that earn them naturally, but no matter which side of the argument you’re on, the penalty for buying links is very, very steep and long-lasting. Google has gone so far as to penalize its own (Google Japan), check this out. Suffice it to say, I don’t and won’t buy links.
But Rand’s video really got me thinking, could I see similar results so quickly on a project at work? Is Google’s real-time search really, real-time? Could a handful of inbound links really trigger a meteoric rise through organic search results just as Rand suggested?
Simply put: yes. Absolutely. Without question.
We recently launched a new project that is very, very specific in target audience and likewise very targeted in content and search phrases. The on-site optimization was performed as the site was built and subsequently launched with a PPC campaign to immediately establish traffic for advertisers (not Google AdWords).
I placed a few inbound links to this new website on some related sites we manage that same Friday after watching Rand’s video. The website had zero inbound links and zero organic search rankings at the time, surviving on PPC only to-date.
Today, I checked the Google search rankings for 3 of the targeted search terms (ones used as anchor text in the inbound links I added) and for 2 of them, the site ranks 24 and 34 respectively. The 3rd term is much more competitive (based on Google’s handy tool) but the site ranks 107.
This proves what many in the SEO community have experienced and known for quite some while, that inbound links from related/relevant resources are essential for search rankings. Simply having great content and relevant content on your website is rudimentary, having great content and relevant content that people will link to is what is required for search rankings.
While I’ve known this for years, I have never been able to test a case where I had a brand new project that was 100% unknown to any search engine and study some fundamental metrics like this.
All of this is to say that SEOmoz’s video was 100% accurate: a few inbound links will act like search ranking steroids, only if you buy your links you essentially get the steroid-like side-effects.
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Kyle Jernigan
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