Michael Martinez, when he was a blogger and regular commenter here at SEOmoz, often chided me for holding the viewpoint that rankings are “all about links.” Recently, there’s been more conversations along those lines, both here at SEOmoz and elsewhere.
It’s a frequent topic for debate, though to me there’s no real cause for contention. Everyone who’s worked in the SEO space for a long time tends to hold some truths to be… self evident. Specifically, these ones:
- In areas of low competition, well-written, well-optimized content on relatively low-link popularity websites can rank at the top of the engines, even if those pages have no external links pointing to them.
- In areas of heavy competition, you will virtually never see content ranking purely because it’s high-quality, well-optimized content. It has to be on a highly-linked-to domain or have many inbound links pointing directly to it.
- Great content has a better ability to attract great links (and more of them) than low quality content.
- Low quality content with lots of great links will outrank high-quality content with few links everytime. We’ve all seen thousands of examples of this in the SERPs.
Based on this last point, I’m of the opinion that, for the moment, at the three major search engines (although MSN can be all sorts of strange on occassion), links outweigh content in nearly every way. Great content is merely a means to an end, not a ranking strategy by itself. In fact, I have little doubt that much (possibly most) of the very best content on the web today ranks nowhere in Google because it hasn’t been well-marketed.
This falls under my “Paris Hilton Law of Visibility,” which states that even the least attractive content can be the most visible with the right media attention. Put another way; the salesman who can unload volcano insurance in the Carolinas will make for a far better SEO than the hermit who invents a cure for volcanoes (I’m assuming you just throw it in the lava pit when it starts boiling like a geologic Pepto-Bismol).
The reason content quality has increased in importance over the last few years has almost nothing to do with LSI or LSA or the increased use of on-page text analysis by advanced search engine algorithms. It has to do with the ease of promoting great content through the rise of social media, a more virally-attuned web audience, and portals like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Netscape, etc. On the flipside, it’s much harder to buy links, build link farms or auto-spam than it ever was. This combination makes the economics of creating great content more and more appealing.
There’s no chicken and egg debate here – SEOs were link-building long before they were linkbaiting, and until such time as Wikipedia pages rank on page four while small-town experts rule the top 10, link building will be the end-goal of search engine optimization.
Your thoughts?
