Quality Versus Quantity for Inbound Links

In trying to get more traffic to your site, you may have wondered as I do, whether it is better to get a hundred different links from a hundred low ranked sites or just a couple of links from a couple of really highly ranked sites.

There's just been a really interesting analysis done by the people at Fortune Interactive.

They found that the quality of inbound links is by far the most important factor in terms of how well your site will rank in all three of the key search engines; Google, Yahoo and MSN. The quality of the inbound link is so superiorly important that it is rated as being 42 times as important as getting a large quantity of links to your site. That's quite an amazing conclusion with huge implications. Bye bye to all the huge blogrolls of reciprocal linking with all your other PR 3 or lower rated sites and friends. This may be next to worthless when it comes to search engine rankings.

Note that this study only analyzed one keyword across all the search engines. The keyword was 'laptops'. They will go on to research other keywords soon, and it will be eye-opening if they find the results are very similar for competitive and non-competitive keywords.

As it is now, 'laptops' is one of the most coveted keywords in the search engine high-roller clubs. Laptops are a consumer (and business) item costing over $1,000, and more so than almost any other type of good imaginable, people typically do all their research online before deciding which laptop to buy. This is a high-paying keyword and the clickthrough rate is high as people are typically in buying mode.

Check out all the search engine ranking factors that were analyzed by this study. It's the most interesting piece of SEO sleuthing I've seen in a while.

Can LinkieWinkie Increase My Page Views?

LinkieWinkie is a maddeningly clever little experiment. Can it help me get more visitors to this blog? Or is it just something that will make the LinkieWinkie.com site shoot up in search rankings?

In either case, it's definitely a great example of "Less is More" for a viral marketing campaign.

I'll report back here on July 5th and let you know. If anyone has already tried this please let me know your results.

Update: Three days after making this post, I can report that I've seen absolutely no traffic resulting from this, or any hint of any links that may have come via LinkieWinkie to my site. So in summary, it seems it's just a LinkieHoaxie with the author's links from that one-page site being the only beneficiary.