Why does Google Care How Many Links You Have?

As is standard in this section of the blog, we are going to look at the principle we are discussing from the standpoint of the search engines. Several of my clients in the past have asked me the question, "Why does Google care how many links I have?" The answer is that the internet is really just the world wide popularity contest. Every link you get is like a vote for your site as the best site on the internet about a certain topic. The more votes you have, the more popular you are, and the more Google likes you... Honest.

It sounds ridiculous, but look at it this way: you wouldn't send your precious web traffic somewhere else, unless you thought the place you were sending it was valuable right? After all, you work hard for traffic, and sometimes you even pay for traffic. If you are going to link to another site, you must think that the content is quite valuable. Since in the end, Google want to provide people with the best content on the internet, they feel like the more links a given website has for a certain keyword, the better the content must be.

Quality of Links

Unlike all men in Thomas Jefferson's bold statement in the Declaration of Independence, all links are not created equal. The inequality of links today is even more evident today than when I started my first website, but the same type of standards apply. Among the biggest things to look at in determining the value of a link is the Page Rank of the page (Page Rank is going to be a later Post). Sites with a page rank of 3 or higher will help your site, while sites with a pagerank of 0-2 will have no effect.

In a Perfect World...

In a perfect world I would have all links from Page Rank 10 sites, and my competition would have no links. Then I would be guaranteed the number one spot for my keywords. Unfortunately, links from page rank 10 sites are quite rare, and my competition has just as much of a chance at getting link as I do.

As in all things on the internet, it comes down to the quality of your content. Other website owners want to send their visitors to the best content on the web almost as much as Google does. So, the better your content is, the more sites are going to link to you.

In Short a Link is a Vote

The more links you have the more likely your content is to be the stuff end users are looking for. A link is a sign (more so in days gone by) that a real human liked the content of your site enough to send people to it.

One more hit to this dead horse and then I am done, I swear. Look at it this way. If your meta says you are about children's play things, and your content agrees, and another website links to you for children's play things, it is a safe bet for search engines to send users to your website when they are searching for children's play things.

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