Why Quality Backlinks Matter?

Generating traffic cost time and money. Pay Per Click or paid search can bring in instant traffic but if your margin is small, a PPC campaign alone would not do the trick. In order to generate sustainable significant traffic, you must have a good organic ranking in search engines. A high rank in SERP depends on various factors but two of the most critical factors are content and backlinks.

Quality of Backlinks Matters

Most often, people tend to focus on the quantity of backlinks alone without realizing how important quality or theme based linking. To further expand on this, here is an example.

Recently a new customer contacted us to help them figure out the issues with their website and pinpoint the cause of their poor SERP ranking. Prior to contacting us, this customer spent a significant amount of money on backlink building. This customer ranked consistently on 3rd or 4th page of Google SERP listings prior to this link building effort. For a highly competitive keyword, this was decent outcome sole based on content.

However, after backlink building campaign and thousands of links later their ranking got worse. In fact, they stop showing among first 500 listings for the keyword they ranked on third page earlier.

After spending lot of time on reviewing their backlinks, we found out that they were not theme based to start with. Most of these links were coming from "staged websites". For those who do not know what a "stage website" is, here is some explanation:

A "staged website" is a website created by an internet marketing or SEO company to sell outbound links. Most of these websites end up looking like link directories since that's all they do. A single page can contain hundreds of outbound links with price starting at $5 per link/month. As you can tell, this is a big money making business for some link building companies. Since most of the links on a "staging website" are driven by commercial interests, there is no theme based linking. In fact it could be even worse as we found out.

What we found out was a poorly designed and executed link building campaign and link coming from what Google considers as "Bad Neighborhood". Take a look at this screenshot from one of the website that was part of this backlinking campaign.

This one page had all kinds of unrelated links with no theme or linking guidelines. In fact as you take a closer look, there were links to adult websites. For example, take a look at this screenshot:

As you can tell, a "sex toy" website is not going to do wonders for another website that sells baby clothes. In this case, link building company was motivated by monetary aspect of link building and did not care about the overall impact of these backlinks.