While content should be "King" it really rates closer to the "Queen" or lower. Why else would you see spammy sites sitting at the top of the SERPs. Spammy sites also get a better click ratio on outgoing ads because they don't answer the persons question so the person moves on. The major search engines are working pretty hard to change this, so for any long term site plan on doing both. Waiting for someone to find your site and link to it could take years, even Google recommends that you try to encourage high quality sites to link to you. (even though they pretty much discourage any ways that you might do this)
In the worst case, that means nobody will ever find your site. That's what I meant with the initial phase. Even for the best site, you need to get out and make sure people know about it. But this is muuuch easier if you have really interesting content on it. Rainer
Hi Folks If you ask me about my experience then i say that both content and back links are important for website rankings (Google perspective). Thou these days every one is talking about Google wrath for those who are chasing back links for their websites (its a crap)! What if i say having your link lingering on a social network with your optimized text post? and you have like 3 months of dedicated Social Network Optimization with 100 of posts with your weblink on hundereds of Social Networks site, is this not a attempt of gaining back links? In a two words both unique content and uniqe back links are important for Search Engines! Cheers Nawaz Shahzad Seo Expert
These two are important but to answer your question, I'll be with content since good content can generate backlinks. Backlinks cannot generate good content.. lol
Is this turning into egg or chicken first debate? No egg = no chicken, no chicken = no egg? Lets have sunny side up egg and a chicken steak. *yum*
The main reason I am asking about what is better to have, content or backlinks, is because most people don't have unlimited resources that they can create content and backlinks constently. From all the posts here, its clear that having both is key. But when having limited resources would it be better to consentrate on content creation or backlinks?
I would prioritize backlinks over content. By no means am I suggesting that developing well crafted, unique and useful content is not a worthy goal. But, in the current state of things, I feel that backlinks win the race. It's been shown time and again that where the site owner has the means to purchase the right kind of links in the right way, that even crappy content can consistently outrank quality. This is sad, but true, and it's been proven repeatedly. Now, is that a strategy that will payoff in the years to come? Probably not, but, who knows? Even it you don't have a long enough purse to buy links, get those links in place, period. Read and learn all you can about link development. Then work to add and improve content. Also, I think using a blog platform for your content helps a great deal, especially adapting WordPress blogs to an SEO agenda. Google seems to love blogs currently.
You need both content and backlinks, but in the end the backlinks are what counts. Like others have said, you can have a great site, but if no one links to it, it won't rank on Google.
Dear all, I want to explain little bit here. Suppose a site has no good content, however, it has good backlinks. Suppose by getting good backlinks, it gets good search rank in google and other SEs. Then visitors will be visited it, but, without having good content it won't be provided information which visitors want. So, it may be happend that they won't be visited it. In the beginning, site may be got good traffic, as time pass, it won't be got that much traffic as before. My point of view, if you get revenue from online business, you should made site having good content. So, first factor is content then after good backlinks.
Overall I say backlinks can overcome content, especially in Google it would seem, but not vice versa - and therefore backlinks win. Googlebombing is the old example of this - type in miserable failure and see what comes up. Hint: many pages without miserable or failure in the entire webpage. Just a lot of links with miserable failure pointing to them. How good and unique your content is will determine how many backlinks you will need to rank. BTW, I've noticed the same thing with MSN ranking me higher on many things. I think they must have links a lot lower in the algo. Maybe a good measure of where your content is at??? And maybe google is a good measure of where the links are at???