In your opinion, which is more important for pagerank & SERPS, quality website content or quality backlinks?? Sil^er_Hunter
My opinion - both are important. Quality content for keywords and for people to come back. number of backlinks - so you rank well in the search engines. Regardless of what people say, the search engines rank your site on how many backlinks you have. One time matt cutts mentioned a popular spammer term on his blog. All of a sudden his blog was ranking on the first page of google for that term - even though his blog had nothing to do with the spammer term. This helped prove that google ranks sites on the number of backlinks they have, and not the topic of the site.
Both are important for SEO purposes. The magic formula is quality content + daily link building methods for high ranks. However, the daily links overrides content in terms of getting you the high ranks you desire.
If I have to choose only one, I would go for backlinks over content. Quality content will help you in ranking for both homepage and inner pages but quality backlinks is far more important. You can live with quality backlinks and with less quality and amount of contents, but you cannot live with only quality contents without quality backlinks backed up anyway.
Taking your analogy further... if I had to select any one out of the given two options.. I would rate backlinks to be air and content being water. I can obviously do well without water (content) for few hours... but air (backlinks) is absolutely a must without which I would not be able to live... even for a minute! Regards, RightMan
I would have to go with backlinks. I have seen websites that shouldn't be at the top of the results but they are because of backlinks. Content is what keeps the user coming back but how are they going to come back if they can't find you in the first place?
That is exactly the point. You can be a very beautifully looking person... but what good it is, if there is no visibility to it.... to enable people to see it and appreciate! And backlinks provide the visibility! Regards, RightMan
Well, no one above noticed that the content does not influence PageRank at all ;-) However, the above repliers are completely right in the point that both content and backlinks are vital for SERP. No preferences can be made easily.
Interesting question. Back links are great but if you have lousy content then no one is going to stay on the site anyway