LinkBuilding vs Content

[rob3786]

For higher google rankings if you had 10 hours a day to work on a site how many hours would you dedicate to link building and how many to content building?

[Manila]

Depends.

The better your site the easier it is to get links.

[matted]

I'd spend almost the entire time on content or other content related initiatives (keyword research, traffic stats for example). You need backlinks - so spend an hour of that time for a month or two to generate a couple hundred backlinks. After that, give yourself a day every so often to check up on
the links and generate some new ones.

[helpyou]

I think that 5 hours to day can be ok, to have good results.
In the begin seen that you are pr0 you should do submission for almost 3 hours to day.

I have done very submission to directories but I am pr3. ( you see http://www.onlinexcasinos.com/directory/index.html and http://www.onlinexcasinos.com/directoryplus/index.html ).

to start it is good to put on quantity. After you can put on quality.

You spend the other 5 hours to do 2 or 3 articles to day.

After 2 or 3 months when you have good pages you start to do echange links. ( It is good to create in this time other websites ).

After one year can have some good results. Before it is very difficult.

[rob3786]

Thanks very much for your advice I will take that on board.

[WinYourWayKyle]

Depends.

The better your site the easier it is to get links.

Agreed!

[TheGooner]

6 hours writing content
2 hours playing poker
1.5 hours surfing
0.25 hours on email
0.25 hours adding a link to a good site that I like.

I don't worry much about link exchanges at all.

[Simmo!]

I think in the longer term, content will have more and more say on how well your site ranks. Unfortunately, for now, there seems to be fair emphasis on backlinks so we have no choice but to try and build links. But in time, Google etc should get better at distinguishing "authority" sites in our field, so content will rule. How long? Who knows: 2,3 or 5 years? There are already signs at Google that backlinks are having less emphasis than before, but they still seem to be a major factor.

[Webzcas]

Content and site development is what I spend the majority of my time on when not reading and posting in forums such as GPWA. I also spend around and hour or two a day studying the results in the search engines. Whilst content is the key to a successful website, you need to put time aside for seo.

[Dominique]

10 hours a day building content (including research etc.) and 0 building links.

There is a similair thread elsewhere and I wrote about this at length.

I built Gamesandcasino.com, which is a google authority site.

When I first started, I did exchange links, and I did submit the site wherever possible.

After about a year, I checked the links and was horrified at how many had gone bad for various reasons. I deleted them and changed my approach completely. At that time G&C barely ranked.

I decided that I wanted google to associate me with sites I admired only. I started linking to just a handful of sites and I didn't ask for links back. These sites would have never linked to me at the time. Once in a while I linked to a friend who I thought was building a good site. You can count the link exchanges I did in 5 years on your fingers.

IMO, you need links pointing at a new site just so the spiders even find you. Once you are being spidered regularly, I think these links can become a negative.

I see it like the aids principle - you sleep with everyone your partner ever slept with. You get 100 outgoing links, and those 100 sites each do the same, there is no way for you to know who all google throws you in a pot with.

Yes, links matter, they are gold coins. IMO you only have so many and then the linking power of your site diminishes.

I don't count in-text links to source sites as outgoing links. Giving credit to the original source of information is important and ethical and isn't done near enough. It's not just for quotes, it's for rewritten info also. I actually think it counts in your favor.

I also don't think the volume of content is all that crucial - being unique is everything. Sometimes you see small sites ranking high and wonder why and how they got there. They usually have a unique approach, or did when they started. Google knows who presented the info first, or who approached it first in that unique way. The later sites are just copies, even if they do not have exact duplicate content.

IMO building a successful site means thinking outside the box. Pick a topic and think about every possible aspect of it. Make a list of all matters involved. Then pick a very, very specific aspect and build as much content around it as you can think of. If you want a site that is larger in scope, still start that way. Be the expert on SOMETHING. Then you can expand step by step from there, or create new sites with a different focus, depending on your business model.

There are hundreds of thousands of competitors out there. Think about what they do, and do it differently. If you don't, you are never going to emerge above the rest.

People argue that new sites today have much less of a chance. I was told the same thing when I started. It takes patience. You can't create something that will rise above hundreds of thousands of sites overnight.

At some point you may want to sacrifice short term gain for long term gain. You may make a little money sooner by using linking schemes and other SEO tricks. But you can make a lot of money later if you present something truly unique and useful.

If you do that, incoming links show up all on their own, and THAT is what google really likes.

Let's get back to the basics - google likes you to link to sites you would recommend to your visitors. And it likes sites linking to you because they think you have something worth seeing.

I do think google can tell the difference, at least to a point, and maybe more than we think. Google keeps it's true linking evaluations secret, what they really look at is anybody's guess.

[rob3786]

That was a really great post thanks alot!

[andrewxr]

6-7 hours writing content
2-3 building links

[MichaelCorfman]

Well, casino city has a team of around fifty people.

Around a third work full-time developing content.
And about a third are software engineers doing development work and keeping our sites up and running.
And about a third handle sales and marketing and administrative and finance matters.

And absoultely no one worries about link exchanges with other sites.

Content is king!

And cross-linking across our network of sites in a way that helps our visitors is important too. Google sees the relevance of our internal cross-links and likes them.

Michael

[villa10]

I don't see link exchange as a must nowadays, but a strong PR is needed to avoid the supplemental index in Google.
Maybe one way, directories etc .

Zero value for links in those mini yahoo directory pages.
All in the Supp. index.
Content pages may have still some weight.

Content is king, but not all the sites doing well are megasites.
I mean that with time, it is possible to have say 200 well written pages with good convertion in sales.

[Dominique]

Content is king, but not all the sites doing well are megasites.
I mean that with time, it is possible to have say 200 well written pages with good convertion in sales.

I definitely agree. It's uniqueness, not volume.

[helpyou]

Content is king. I agree to 100 %.

you remember to have of some good content it is not sufficient.......

To have success you must point on the quality.
[ For seo you should understand the algorithm of google, One algorithm can't understand to 100 % the quality ]

[ck8795]

Maybe I am wrong but they both go hand in hand...don't they. Without the content you won't get links, without the links your content will not be seen as valuable/trusted. Google likes links so they can see that other sites trust yours and feel that it has some sort of significance.

Which leads me to my question. If I am purchasing backlinks...how many should I add per day/week without being penalized. I am buying links of different ranges and because my site is only a 2 I have not gone above a PR5 just so it maintains some sort of natural approach t it. Is this correct?

[MichaelCorfman]

I thought the discussion about the importance and time spent on link exchanges in this forum was interesting.

So for this week's GPWA Times newsletter the question of the week is about how much time members spend working on link exchanges.

If you would like to participate in the poll on this topic, or just view the results, following is a link to the poll thread for the question of the week:

https://www.gpwa.org/forum/how-many-...es-171091.html

Michael

[Fergie]

6 hours writing content
2 hours playing poker
1.5 hours surfing
0.25 hours on email
0.25 hours adding a link to a good site that I like.

I don't worry much about link exchanges at all.

That's pretty much my daily routine, too.

Assuming we're talking about ranking in google:

About not doing link exchanges, as suggested earlier, that might work if your site is several years old (and/or if you have 1000's of links to your site from message board posts). If you have a new site, then the advice given by Simmo! is dead-on. Unless you have 5 - 10 years to wait for things to happen, you have to get some good incoming links, and, unfortunately, the only way for a new site (other than buying) is to exchange.

Start by exchanging, and then, when your site has aged nicely and has acquired solid content, you can start being selective. Eventually you can stop exchanging links completely. Just be very careful about the neighborhoods you link to - and don't just put the links up and then forget about them. Keep checking the neighborhoods the sites you've linked to. nothing is static regarding the search engines.

It's also a very good idea out to link to quality sites. This seems to give your site a boost. Perhaps google feels that sites who link to good sites show that they are interested in adding quality to their visitors' experience.

[Deaddog]

A few months back I had a link exchange database failure, I lost about 100 links. I watched my page rank fall from 4 to 3 in a surprisingly short time. Also my Alexa rating dropped drastically.

Since then I got back about 25 of those lost links, but the main focus has been on content. PR is now back to 4, probably because of the content and the SEO work I've been doing, not the recovered links.

I think that it's more important to maintain good content then to spend time adding links.

For me 9h55m on content and 5m on links.