Linking Does Not Affect Ranking
The usual mantra of search engine optimization experts is that “linking drives up ranking.” So, you find your site in need of some ranking boost and you do all this strategic link placement, spend all this money either on time or advertising, to get those links moving for you, and you expect to see some ranking changes. Well, I have come to the conclusion that the number of links, either overall or targeted, has no positive or negative correlation to ranking position.
A fabulous SEO article from SEO Moz reports that linking in general is a disputed factor in determining rank. Additionally, global popularity of the site is the highest disputation among the polled SEO experts of what constitutes a valuable link.
I performed my own preliminary experiment to determine whether or not the number of links has a correlation with a site’s ranking for any given keyphrase.
Methodology
First, I generated a list of 20 random words using simple random sampling. Of those 20 random words, I ran them through Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool and pulled the top 5 phrases for each. My total list amounted to 89 keyphrases (some words had less than 5 phrases).
Then, each keyphrase was run through Google’s search engine and the top 10 results for each was queried using both “allinurl:” and “link:” strings. The total number for each was recorded, as was the rank of each URL. Then, the ranking was compared to both the “allinurl:” and “link:” numbers to provide a correlation value.
Sites [XLS] is an Excel file that contains all the keyphrases and URLs searched. Google’s API capped me off at 534 URLs because they only allow 1000 per day and I met my limit, but hey, we can continue the experiment if desired. However, 534 is a high enough number to make a statistical conjecture.
Results
The results were that there existed no correlation between the number of “allinurl:” or “link:” links for any given URL and ranking among top-ten-ranked websites. (r=-0.07 & -0.04, respectively.)
What this means isn’t that linking must go out the window. There exists enough confirmatory evidence that linking does affect ranking to a significant degree. What it does suggest is that the quality of link is much more important than the quantity of links.
Comments
David Golding Design | | Web and Print Solutions
Dec 18th, 2006, 4:27 am
[...] 8. You can’t buy links. Well, sure you can, but it’s becoming less and less effective in site rankings. What does work, however, is gaining quality links. My own research demonstrates that it is the quality of links, not quantity that will improve your site’s ranking. Consider a celebrity endorsement for a traditional product: it costs lots of money to get the endorsement, but is well worth it because the consumer finds them more trustworthy. If a highly popular web site endorses you, it will carry more weight for the consumer than just seeing lots of ads. Buying links will get you lots of “ad space,” if you will, but negotiating quality links is like getting prime public relations. [...]
David Golding Design | | Web and Print Solutions
Nov 9th, 2006, 3:52 pm
[...] I recently posted on how linking doesn’t affect ranking in Google’s engine. My research shows that there exists no correlation between quantity of links and rank position for any given keyphrase. However, in this post, I’d like to pick up where I left off and discuss quality linking strategy. [...]