Members AreaContent is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. Content is NOT important. (…)
I could make an entire post like that with nothing but rubbish content and it wouldn’t matter. Why? Because content doesn’t matter, backlinks do.
Ok, that might sound a bit exaggerate… And I must admit, whenever I work on a site I spend more time working with the content than anything else (Even in my blackhat ventures like [YACG], it’s pretty evident that I make a big deal out of content).
In fact, you know what? Scratch everything I just said. Content IS important, but it all depends on what you are trying to achieve. I make a big deal out of it because of the usability of the website. Because Good content = Returning visitors, and we all know that.
But in the particular case of rankings, backlinks are much more important than content. Let’s take as an example the keyword “click here”:
Interesting. Now let’s take a look at “worst band in the world”:
*I firebug’ed out the first results for the sake of the length of this post
It’s evident that there’s not a single mention of “click here” or “worst band in the world” in those sites, but still they are ranking #1 for those keywords. Why? Simple, there’s a bunch of backlinks with that anchor text pointing to those sites.
(Bullshit alert!)
I’ve done some extensive testing over the past couple of years using neural networks, statistical analysis, midgets and large quantities of vodka… And I think I figured out how Google’s algorithm work. I’m planning on releasing a paper later on, but here’s the basic formula:
Where K is Google’s magic constant (100), 0.1 is the position you want (0.1 for #1, 0.2 for #2, 1.1 for #11 etc…), x1 is the number of words in the page you want to rank (without counting the keyword you want to rank for), x2 is the number of times the keyword appears on the page and f(x1,x2) is an approximation to the number of backlinks with the keyword as anchor that you need.
You don’t believe me? Let’s try it out with http://get.adobe.com/reader/ for “click here” on #1 position. I used for this experiment this word count tool and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, http://get.adobe.com/reader/ has 652,799 backlinks.
Yes, this is the moment when you go all HOLY-MOTHER-OF-GOD at your computer screen and nearby peers.
(Bullshit alert is over!)
Bottom line: Looking for rankings? Focus on backlinks.
