Links provide only 5-15% of Ranking Factors?

Hi,

I cam accross one site/company which claims that links
aren't as important as everyone thinks. He told me that
links do only have a weight of 5-15% of all ranking factors.

I think what he wanted to tell me was that content is much
more important but 5-15% sounded a bit too low to me.

What is your opinion?

 

Let me guess, they're not selling links and they work at Google?

Here's my guess.

Content 40%
Trustrank 30%
Links 30%

Fluctuating with the seasons.

 

Interesting, I love when anyone claims to have any idea on how much a specific thing is factored into Google search results. I mean, it's only one of the most guarded secrets Google has; not to mention how easily a competitor could mock search results if they had this data. These are one of those sites you just completely ignore all together.

 

no, they are not selling links, they do SEO for clients, but
link building is also one part of their job.

its right that google has never disclosed their ranking factors
but when someone has done a good amount of seo work then
he could at least estimate the weight of the different ranking factors.

ssandecki, you also do SEO projects. what do you have discovered so far?

 

Due to the issue of "competitiveness" with different keywords results can be achieved with different SEO plans. Overall after countless SEO analysises and projects I still wouldn't attempt to claim knowledge over the factoring percentages. However, below is the order I would rate specific things.

1. Content
2. Content Structure
3. Internal Linking Structure
4. On-Page SEO (301 redirects, proper anchor, images, etc)
5. Link Building (Quality Relevant One-Way Backlinks; within content)

 

Why not link building before On page SEO and internal structure/ It seems to me that even if a page doesn't have a very good internal link structure it can survive with good backlink and good sitemap.
Sorry if this seems stupid, I only want to learn with the experts

 

It's impossible to give reliable numbers, for less popular terms shitty content and just a bit of spammy link building can be more than sufficient to get decent rankings.

The more popular, the more competitive, the more important the content...which, on the other hand, is only important to attract quality links (If you are looking at rankings only, not bookmarkers, returning visitors, income).

Bottom line: The better the content, the more quality links a site attracts, the better the rankings.

So, if you want to define links as your own linkbuilding (directories, social bookmarking, signatures, articles, etc.), I'd say 5-15% sounds realistic. If you want to define links as the overall importance of incoming links to your site as a ranking factor, my educated guess would be at 80%+.

 

Spammy link building gets results but without good content and content structure the conversion rate will be low.

5-15% for Linkbuilding defined as (directories, social bookmarking, signatures, articles, etc.) sounds right.

 

I think links are probably the single most important factor.

 

I think that is what the experts here are trying to rebut!

 

It's all speculation. Until the search engines tell us we will have on way to know, but it makes for an interesting conversation.

 

I was looking at Webmaster Guidelines on Google the other day. They didn't say what the percentage is of course but they did say they use a democratic way of ranking a page. The called links to your site as a vote.

To me that was significant as google guards such information. Yet here they are disclosing at least part of what is important.

But I have some pages ranking better than I expected them too as fast as they have. It's been a couple of months now so looks like not going to be sand boxed. I'm not getting a lot of traffic though. But Goggle shows no back links at all. Oddly, I know there are some but they must have used the no follow tag in robots.txt?

What I'm getting out of this is that content is more important. I'm now writing for more competitive key words. Which will I hope will eventually get more traffic. More content, better keywords are most important. Based on Google's website link backs are also important.

 

Well, as we all know that content is the king in SEO point of view and we need to get quality back link as well so according to me 50% quality back links and 50% unique content this will enough to achieve the goal

 

I find back links are hard thing to get Unless i pay for them and if I pay for them and get busted that's bad too. People saying paying for them is okay but not too google that is 100% clear.

 

That is very true. The issue of "competitiveness" is the number one factor for determining how important linkbuilding is within the seo plan.

 

Well i feel that if sites have good content it will automatically get many back links. Getting one way backlink for free that too from site have good PR is almost impossible now a days. So best think is to put relevant best content on site and see how ranking shoots. So SEO brothers am i right?

 

With business sites it's harder to get one way back links for free.

 

Link building alone will not gain your site good SERP's, nor will good content, or internal link structure, or any other 'on page seo' factor. Serp's are based on several factors which is all speculation - do we know that certain factors matter? Nope, we don't - we just speculate in the hope they do!

 

it could well be true, who knows for sure. But one thing that does work over time is link building. I promise that if you don't link build your site will stagnate.

 

Nobody knows the exact google soup recipe, but most experienced webmasters know that you need to get the right words in the right places on your page. Then get those same words in links back to your site. All content and no links makes Jack a dull boy. All links and no content makes Jack a dull boy. Content and links together gets Jack noticed.