No this isn’t an article about backlinks beating content because we know the right backlinks keep nearly blank pages high in Google – for months at a time. It’s just a theory so feel free to discuss with me in the comments. Bit of a ramble. I’m thinking about this and looking for exceptions, or evidence against, and to start an honest discussion. i’m fed up pumping info out, I’d prefer to start a discussion on this one.

It’s about ranking in Google or not ranking. Based on observations.

Links effect rankings, more, they even PERMIT rankings. If you haven’t got the keywords in links you won’t feature and you certainly won’t rank.

Content is king, especially for humans, but that content can’t rank without links. I often wonder if Google needs the keyword you are wanting to rank for in the site’s link profile. If it’s not in this link profile for your site, you wont rank.

You get the keywords in your link profile by

  • getting links from other websites (primary)
  • internal navigation links (secondary)

I’m wondering if Google treats a page title as a tertiary link if the first two signals aren’t clear enough and especially if the content is well cited (but with poor anchor text)?)

The relationship between content and links is incestous and can’t be seperated. I think seo zones. To rank it needs to be in your link profile and in your content, more specifically in:

  1. Links
  2. Title
  3. Content

In that order. Google is making it harder to rank without having the keyword in these zones. Even though the title is 2nd in my list, you can quickly see how pivotal your page title is. I mean can you even rank what’s more important out of the 3?

Adding a made up keyword to a page invites the supplementals to kick in with different rules – letting content rank without links (I think).

In normal serps you can have the word on the page but because it is not in the link profile it won’t rank. Though in a page title, it may rank, throw in an internal link or backlink, it will rank. I’m talking keywords here not phrases.

Perhaps authority sites rank because of their link profile, not the content (although, of course, they wouldn’t have that link profile without that content!) – But I am talking about the actual wheels that are play here.

I don’t think I need LOTS more content on one page, I think I need LOTS more titles and words in my link profile – the content just backs this up ( a strange thought if you think about it). So in effect for new pages you can get away with less content (more may increase long tail searches).

So it’s not content I am adding, I am adding important keywords (and diversity of these) to my link profile. More links less content – and I’m still not linkbuilding yet. You can do a lot of this via internal links on a strong domain.

So for ranking, the most important is:

  1. Diversity of keywords in your entire link profile
  2. Diversity of keywords in your page title
  3. Content (enough to make a page relevant to the keywords it can rank for)

If you think this way you can get pages that don’t rank to rank, quite easily. and you don’t need to buy 100 crappy links from domainers (although that can work too lol).

But yes you can get to the end of this article and say so links beat content, and yes, they can, but you’ve missed the point of what I am on about or my writing has confused – sorry.

Mmmm…. I don’t think I needed this much content!

Note perhaps I am not thinking about this the right way. If someone can help, let me know and yes of course I know there are other things at play too.

PSST – Did you see our new SEO Reference Guide For Beginners? I certainly didn’t need that much content, but hey I went for it :)

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)