Sep

Backlinks versus Content – Which is King?

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Backlinks versus Content – Which is King?

The debate rages on in SEO circles; which is more important in your efforts to rank higher in search results: the content on your website or the backlinks to your website?

Some SEO experts swear by backlinks while a number of other SEO experts swear by content. Google itself has finally shed some light on this question, which gives us the correct answer once and for all.

On Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Matt Cutts explains that both content and backlinks are important to ensure visitors have a positive experience at your website. However, Matt also said that the number of pages Google crawls on your website depends upon how “important” your website is deemed to be by Google. And what is Google’s measure of a website’s importance? The number of high-quality backlinks that point to the website.

Matt went on to say that if you have 500 pages of excellent content but you only have about 50 backlinks to your website, then Google will only crawl (and index) a small number of those pages. As a result, the rest of the un-crawled pages will do little to nothing in your efforts to get ranked higher in Google.

Conversely, Matt said a website that only has 20 pages of good content but has a lot of authoritative backlinks to that content will rank very high in search results for the keywords used in those backlinks.

The lesson? While content is important to the success of any website, backlinks are king. Without backlinks not only will your content go unnoticed by Google, but the content you do have won’t be ranked very high relative to your competitors that have more and better backlinks than you.

Which leads to one very familiar piece of advice: Constantly strive to build high-quality backlinks using a variety of methods to get to the top of search results, but make sure you have content on your site the gives visitors what they want once they get to your website.