Google still advocates the ‘content is king’ rule i.e. what makes a great site rank highly is great content that lots of people want (and do) link to.
In a recent article on GreyWolf’s SEO blog, Michael concludes that having great content NO LONGER guarantees having great links. His evidence comes from his six month case study in which he spent 90% of his time on content and 10% on manual link building. He found that despite:
- spending 10 days researching and writing one great post
- getting numerous articles on the Frontpage of Digg
- having hundreds of thousands of page views…
Only one PR 7 site linked to his posts and, typically only PR2-3 sites linked 2-3 times. What’s more, Google didn’t rank any of these top posts highly and traffic was not coming from Google in any significant numbers. The posts that did rank for certain keywords came from sites who had manually built links.
A bleak result for natural link building.
So how should you get a higher rank in Google if good content doesn’t make a difference? Things are always more complicated. It seems that you cannot rely on solely having fantastic content to build links, you may have to combine methods of getting your links in as many places on the web as possible. People are still linking to posts which are interesting and well-written but they maybe need some cajoling. Melanie from the Search Engine People goes through some the methods she uses to get in touch and build a rapport with other bloggers in the aim of getting a link.
Content needs promotion though, otherwise your site may continue to go unnoticed. Manually building links will help to make your website more successful along with having good content which should be at the heart of all sites worthy of a visit.
