I have been trying to maintain the quality of my link building campaign by only getting backlinks from related sites. However, my competition have 10 times as many links as my site and are ranking higher in the serps...but they have links from a load of unrelated sites/blogs which also link to sex/casino sites. These sites do have half decent PR (4+ usually). I guess it's a trade off between speed/quantity and quality. Should I just do what the competiton do and get a link from anywhere, or should I maintain the quality?
Both, in my opinion. Yes, get back links from high PR, high quality sites! That said you must understand that getting links in a "natural" manner doesn't exclude quantity as well. I am NOT saying that go out and try and get back links from "bad neighborhoods", porn sites, gambling sites and pharmeceutical? sites, don't. But when you think about it a pr 2 today may be a 3, 4 or even 5 in 3, 6 months. I am not certain what your competition is doing but I do suggest trying to get as many high pr backlinks as possible while at the same time putting some effort in getting other back links that are relevant to your site regardless of pr as pr is not all that matters. Is the site you are getting back links from well designed, does it offer something to the community or do you simply enjoy the site. It isn't that the site with the most links wins, but it often appears that way. Focus on getting backlinks, some of which your competitors has and worry less on the "quality" vs "quantity" issue. I would love to have nothing but pr 5 or higher backlinks but that is impractical and choosing sites solely on that criteria closes you off to the benefits of other lower pr sites. If only it were that easy. Good Luck!
Thanks for the advice Rich. What do you think about about the relatedness issue. This is what is puzzling me a bit. I would say 60% of the competitons' links are totally unrelated i.e "health pills" or "mortgage" sites linking to their tech site. I though this could harm your ranking, but it doesn't seem to be doing the top 10 sites any harm lol.
I agree with Rich. You should be looking for quality links, however, quantity is also important because it gives you a presence on the web. As far as whether or not backlinks should be related to your product, preferably yes.
60% doesn't really seem to be a problem. I would be very aware of what my competitors are doing but you will never be able to spend the time determining all of what they are doing and still do a great job of building your own links. When you take into account their on page seo, age of back links, and that not all backlinks are shown it is only one factor in how or which backlinks to get. I would definitely concentrate on getting related or relevant back links but again not to the exclusion of all other links. When I am searching for backlinks I rarely fail to get back links because they are not related. I always start out looking for related links and make it a priority but I also have a goal of getting as many links as I can that are good pr, high quality sites, sites that have a lot of backlinks, sites/blogs that get a good amount of traffic, older sites, newer sites, occasional reciprocal (occasional), directory links (occasionally) ........... Relevance is certainly thought to be good for your site but depending on your site and the niche I would not spend all my time getting back links that are relevant. I don't think it is particularly natural in terms of building back links. Don't forget that getting backlinks is a long term practice and a variety of backlinks for a lot of different reasons will work best for you, in my opinion.
I personally believe quality links are better for google, and quantity links are better for Yahoo. I agree that you need a little of both. You need quality links from sites with allot of pages. If you can get a sitewide link from a quality site with 500 pages indexed in yahoo and google, and a number of them have PR - that will help you greatly.
In my opinion the quality of backlinks is more important than quantity. If you have only 5 backlinks from PR6 website thats better than 20 backlinks from PR1 - 2 websites.
You'd better try to get more links in the precondition they are quality ones.Both of them are very important to the rank.So you should pay attention to both of them.Only then can you defeat your competitors in the end.