Grumpy SEO Guy
Why You Shouldn't Focus on NUMBER of Backlinks - Episode 68
This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 68. Why you should not be concerned with the number of backlinks a website has and what you should use instead. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready, let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, let me tell you why I'm Grumpy today. I'm Grumpy today because a lot of people are really concentrating on the number of backlinks that a website has. Look, what you need to know is that number of backlinks does not matter. Now, you are completely right, backlinks matter. In fact, backlinks are part of the four things that you need to rank. And by the way, the other ones are not having a penalty, having content, and having relevancy, okay? And I said backlinks, but like, how I explain it is you need authority, not backlinks, but you're right because backlinks provide authority, okay? Without authority, you do not rank, and without backlinks, you do not have authority. So you are definitely right, okay? When you say you need backlinks, but the number of backlinks does not matter. And in this episode, we're going to explain why. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started, everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. Now, I get a lot of questions and I see a lot of questions on Reddit that are somehow like this. Hey, our competitor's website has 1,000 backlinks and our website only has 60 backlinks. How will we ever outrank them? It's a great question and it makes sense because when you're starting out and you learn the backlinks are important, you assume that more backlinks is preferable and all else being equal it would be, but usually that's not the case. So what if I told you that your competitors have 1,000 backlinks and you have 60 backlinks and with just a handful of additional backlinks, you could outrank them? A lot of people would not believe that. They'd say, well, but they have 1,000. How is only a couple backlinks gonna do anything? Well, because it's about quality, it's not about quantity. Okay, a separate place where people make this confusing conclusion is DR. Now, I've spoken about this on other episodes, but I'm gonna give you a short little version right now. DR, what is DR? DR is domain rating, okay? It's a value that was produced by Ahrefs that is roughly a guess at how much authority a website has, okay? I'm not saying that DR is bad. We use DR all the time, okay? But DR is not precise and it is not the technical value that any search engines use as far as I know. The point is DR is a guess, okay? It is an approximation of what Ahrefs thinks a website's authority is. That's all it is. But people ask the question all the time, how much DR do I need to outrank this competitor? Or how fast can I raise my DR? Or how can I raise my DR? Or how can I get more DR so that I can outrank this? Or tell me how to increase my DR, I need to rank higher. Okay, listen, none of those questions is the best question to be asking. However, when you're a novice at SEO or even if you're just confused by what you've heard online, okay? Those questions are completely understandable. I have a whole other episode that talks about DR but let me give you a short version, okay? DR is a guess at what your authority is. It is not directly associated with ranking, okay? So the only people who really care about raising DR are beginners who think that if they raise their DR their website's gonna rank higher, okay? Which may or may not be right, okay? It's possible to raise your DR and not have your website rank higher, okay? And backlink sellers who know that they can get more money when they sell a backlink on a higher DR website. And by the way, that's not the right metric to use for selling backlinks but that's a whole other conversation. So look, asking how do I raise my DR? It seems like a smart way to ask how do I rank higher? But it's not the same question. Those are different questions, okay? Do not focus on DR and I think I've explained that in another episode. You should focus on raising your rank. You should focus on having your website be at the top of the search engines, okay? And almost nothing that you do is going to be directly related to increasing DR. As your website's rank increases, the DR might increase. But raising your DR separately is not necessarily going to make your website rank higher, okay? So again, the only people that care about DR are beginners and backlink sellers because they think that they can put a higher price on backlinks from higher DR websites. It's a whole other discussion. Anyway, the point is DR is not what makes your website rank. So asking how do I raise my DR is not the right question. The question, by the way, is how do I get my website to the top of the search engines? Same thing with backlinks. People focus on backlinks and they concentrate on it. And they say this website has 500 backlinks and we only have 20 and oh, what am I going to do because they have hundreds more backlinks than we do. It's like, well, okay, cool. It doesn't matter at all, okay? Because backlinks are about quality. They are not about quantity. I'm going to say that again, backlinks are about quality. They are not about quantity. Let me give you an example next because I want you to actually understand this, okay? Amazon, let's talk about Amazon, okay? Amazon has 1.7 billion backlinks, okay? 1.7 billion backlinks, all right? Now, is Amazon always in the top position? No, they are often, but they're not always. Sometimes websites outrank Amazon for different things. Do you think that the website that is ranking higher than Amazon has greater than 1.7 billion backlinks? The website that's outranking Amazon does not have greater than 1.7 billion backlinks. Therefore, number of backlinks is not the deciding factor. But people are going to somehow explain away that somehow. So whatever, I'm not sure to tell you. But look, number of backlinks does not matter. It is a novice statistic that people concentrate on when they finally realize that backlinks are important and they immediately assume that more must be better. Well, I need more backlinks. I know I finally realized, I finally realized that backlinks are important and I need more. I need more backlinks. So, what happens? They might find a backlink seller who will sell them thousands of backlinks for a very low price. Those are worthless and they're not going to help you, but that's also a different discussion. There's a reason that good backlinks are expensive. There's a reason that cheap backlinks are cheap, but it's a totally different discussion. Anyway, the purpose of this episode is to tell you that the number of backlinks you have is not important, okay? I want you, when you log in to whatever software you're using, okay? To check on your website or your competitors. And by the way, you should do those. It's good whenever I get a question from somebody and they're like, "Hey, I noticed this thing in AHrefs "or, "Hey, I found this thing in SEMrush. "What does it mean?" Those are good questions. I can tell that you're thinking and you're actually putting forth some energy to learn how to do SEO. So, great, great job. But, here's what I want you to do. When you log in to whatever tool you like to use, okay, I want you to ignore the part that talks about number of backlinks, okay? I want you to ignore it. I'm gonna tell you what you should look at instead. But for right now, I want you to ignore it. Because if it says 100 or 1,000 or 10 or whatever, does not matter, there are very few cases I can think of when I have been doing SEO and I care what the number of backlinks that a website has is. Like, I just don't care because it's not important, okay? Now, if you want something to focus on because you just said, you can't focus on number of backlinks, I need something to focus on. You said, first of all, grumpy SEO guys, I can't focus on DR. Nice, I can't focus on backlinks. What should I focus on? I'm making this like short, so it will just make sense for the sake of discussion. If you need something to concentrate on, concentrate on referring domains, okay, RD. Now, this is not the key to all of your SEO problems, but it's definitely superior to number of backlinks. Okay, let's talk a little bit about this. Referring domains, RD, okay, what is it? A referring domain is a website or a domain that links to you. Okay, so if a website links to you, that's one referring domain, okay? And if they link to you one time, then that's one backlink. Now, if they link to you four times from the same website, you still have one RD, but now you have four backlinks. By the way, here's a secret that for some reason, people don't know, it's not even a secret, but anyway, you don't get additional points for more backlinks from the same website. So I want you to just consider how that would ruin SEO if that worked, okay? Because then you wouldn't need to go out and get good quality backlinks. You could just get a website and get hundreds and thousands of links from that one website. You could just, you could just make a page that just had a link a thousand times to your website and you have a thousand backlinks, but they would only be from one referring domain. So it doesn't help you, okay? But if you need a number to concentrate on, and I just told you not to use number of backlinks, you can concentrate on referring domains. Here's a question for you, okay. Which do you think is superior SEO out of these two websites? Okay, the first website has 1,000 backlinks from 10 referring domains, okay? The second website has 100 backlinks from 100 referring domains. So first website, 1,000 backlinks, 10 referring domains. The second website has 100 backlinks from 100 referring domains. The second website is better, okay? Well, it has better SEO. So why? Because referring domains is important. That means 100 other websites are linking to you. The first website only has 10 websites linking to them, but they have a thousand backlinks, which means maybe each of those websites is linking to it 100 times. Why would that even happen? Why would a website link to another website 100 times? You don't get extra credit for that, whatever. So look, higher referring domains is better. And if you need a number to focus on, focus on number of referring domains. Look, there are cases when some of those referring domains aren't counted, okay? That's a different topic. We're gonna talk about that later. There are techniques for finding out if the number of referring domains is as useful as you think it is. Because like I said, just like having a lot of backlinks from some domain is not going to give you extra link juice. There are times when the actual number of referring domains that you see might not be benefiting your website the way you think they are. And even so, number of referring domains is a better metric than number of backlinks. But that is a separate conversation for a different time. So, just for now, if you need to focus on something, 'cause you need to obsessively look at the numbers, okay? Number of referring domains is what you should look at, not number of backlinks. But I'm also officially saying that referring domains is not like perfect, okay? And there are problems associated with it, but we'll talk about that on a different day. So, just for now, number of referring domains is better than number of backlinks. When we're doing an analysis of a client or their competition or whatever, and I log in and I see number of backlinks, if it's 10 backlinks, I'm unconcerned. If it's a thousand backlinks, I'm unconcerned. If it's 300,000 backlinks, I'm still unconcerned. Because it doesn't matter. Because number of backlinks does not matter. But you're still right, 'cause I feel I can feel people becoming frustrated with this, because they're like grumpy SEO guy. You spent all these podcast episodes telling us that authority is what matters, and backlinks are what matters. And now you're saying that it's not about the number of backlinks, it doesn't even make sense. I'm telling you, it's not about the quantity of backlinks you have. It is about the quality of backlinks you have. Those of you that run SEO agencies have probably had the experience where you get a client who doesn't have as many backlinks as their competition, and you can outrank their competition with a few good quality backlinks. This makes perfect sense to anybody who has done SEO. But to people that are just starting, it's confusing. How could less backlinks be more powerful? I'm describing that in this episode. It is about quality, it is not about quantity. You have to understand the difference. Anyway, let's summarize. I feel like this is a good ending point for this episode. So let's summarize. Number one, backlinks are very important. You are quite correct. Backlinks are important. But it is not about quantity. It's not about how many. It is about quality. It is about how good they are, okay? You need good quality backlinks to rank. A few good quality backlinks will get you closer to the top of the search engines than lots of low quality backlinks. And if you need a number to look at, because you just realize it, you're not supposed to be looking at number backlinks, look at number of referring domains. And even though it's not ideal, okay? There are still problems with referring domains, and we're gonna discuss those on a future episode, okay? It is still better because, for example, a website with 1,000 backlinks from 10 domains is worse than a website with 100 backlinks from 100 domains, okay? The first website only has 10 websites linking to it. It has 1,000 backlinks, but from only 10 websites. Does that seem like kind of a peculiar situation? Why would 10 websites link to some different website 1,000 times total, right? Like, seriously. But the other website has 100 backlinks from 100 domains. Each website's linking to it once. That's cool. That website has 100 domains linking to it. The other website only has 10, even though it has more backlinks total. Kinda doesn't make sense if you think about it. So if you need a number to look at, look at referring domains before number of backlinks. Hopefully, you understand this. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions, or wanna suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is grumpyseoguy. You can visit the grumpyseoguy subreddit, or you can email me at hello@grumpyseoguy.com. If you email me, please either whitelist my email address, or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder. And it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks. And I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you wanna support the podcast, because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet, and it's free, you can do so at patreon.com/grumpyseoguy. And I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpyseoguy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about why publicly mentioning your clients on your website is suspicious. (upbeat music) (dramatic music)