SEO Mistake: Backlink Quantity Matters

One of the biggest mistakes that newbie SEOentists make is assuming that quantity actually matters in your link building process. Well. I am not going to tell you that quantity doesn’t matter at all, but search engine optimization is played by slightly different rules.

Most sites that are dominating popular niches on the search engines have thousands of incoming links. So, it’s simple to look at TechCrunch and come to believe that those guys are ranked number 1 because their millions of incoming links. I’d like to think of backlink quantity as a tie-breaker. If I go against a site identical to mine, as far as SEO is concerned, I should be able to beat it if I have more backlinks. Now I am assuming that everything is equal between the two of us, and I just happen to have a bunch of links from sites that are not that important (assuming we both have the same number of quality backlinks).

I am really simplifying this whole thing, but one link from a PR 10 site is more important than thousands of links from PR 0 or 1 blogs. There is just no comparison. Now, keep in mind that a quality backlink will also have a quality anchor text. But whatever you do, don’t ever assume that you can just overwhelm your organic search competitors by getting crappy PR 0 links from thousands of Weblogs.