I’ve just been re-reading some of my previous posts and maybe my opinion of backlinks is a bit unclear, so I’ll explain my thoughts a bit further.
I feel it might be easy to misinterpret my opinions that backlinks aren’t very important. This is not what I think, the point I have been trying to make is they are not the one and only thing that’s important. That tells you nothing new but there is an important concept that many SEO’ers seem to be ignoring… Backlinks do not over-ride low relevancy, or to put it differently, many webmasters are taking some steps backwards while they are stepping forward. I don’t know how many steps back and in the scheme of things it might be quite low in comparison but let’s say for arguments sake, for all the effort involved in getting decent backlinks, some of that effort is completely wasted, why?
A site with very high relevancy and low backlinks may easily beat a site in the serps with thousands of backlinks but very low relevancy, or in the case of MFA sites, virtually no relevancy. Other than creating a site by automation, I really cannot see why anybody would bother creating MFA sites. I’m talking about those pure MFA sites, the ones with almost zero content, just enough to trigger the AdSense content on the right track. You could take a zero content MFA site, spend half hour creating some unique content for it and have a much easier time pushing the site in the SERP’s with the added benefit of owning a site that earns some money and won’t get banned.
Let’s presume then that you have a website and you want to rank for a keyword or key-phrase. Let’s say my key phrase is “how to program pic microcontrollers”. I create a webpage, I name the page, howtoprogrampicmicrocontrollers.html and use the key phrase “how to program pic microcontrollers” for my title tag and then on the page I write just those five words, the keyphrase and nothing else. Ok, so that’s the smallest webpage in history but there is no doubt it’s one hundred percent relevant. Will it do me any good in the SERP’s, I doubt it, at least not with a very high pagerank or sudden ownership of about.com (although that would make an interesting test) .
I’m pretty sure most would agree with me so far. So now we step up a bit and write a 800 word article on the subject of “how to program pic microcontrollers” and throw it out to Google. A bit of work and we could rank for that key phrase fairly easily. For now, let’s forget about pages from the likes of “wikipedia” and “about” which let’s face it, don’t even need contain the keyphrase to rank the top spot, let’s just talk about being in competition with the other ordinary websites which Google do allow you to compete with on a fair playing field.
Lets say we need a PageRank of between 2 and 4 to realistically get within the top ten. Now how much effort will you put into the content of the page if lets say you already have the website ranking at 4?
This is where I’m trying to make my point in the previous posts. This is where some webmasters get lazy. Go back to the first page example which only contains just the key phrase “how to program pic microcontrollers” on the whole page, we agreed it probably won’t rank very well, so would you use this page to try to compete with another pr4 site that has a 800 word relevant article on the subject. No of course not. But now the important part, how hard do you try because if you aren’t careful you could easily add another 795 words to your page that actually pull your ranking possibility even lower than if you had left it with just the five word key phrase!
Remember, relevancy means relevancy. A patronising statement it maybe but relevant to this subject because it seems some people don’t think hard enough about it. Making a page relevant does not mean including the key phrase “x- percent of word count” amount of times, it means staying on topic.
Look at this very article and try to think like a computer. Now tell me what is my topic about.
The title says backlinks and relevancy so that, you would think, gives us a good start? (Although I do have my suspicions that the title doesn’t count as much as most think it does, I’ll get back when I have more test results).
Or is it a page on how to program pic microcontrollers?
Maybe even MFA sites which I could strengthen right here in this sentence by saying something like made for Adsense in bold font and then making it anchor text like this. Made for Adsense
When you’re reading this, it’s pretty clear to a human what the topic is about but to a computer? Probably not. There’s an easy way to test just how relevant a page will be to Google, but I’ll reveal that one when I’ve tested and confirmed my results a bit more, for now, you’ll just have to wait until then.
