As many as you can is the simple answer – but the real question to how many backlinks should you have is: Where Is Your Time Best Spent? I’m going to shock most of you with my answer… it’s not going to be the standard SEO answer to this question. I’m going to be a contrarian, and look to the future rather than the past.
This is, after all, a marathon – not a sprint. I’m looking at where I want to be a year from now, five years from now, a decade from now. And as someone planning retirement – I have far less time on my plate than some young kid fresh out of college – so my time must be spent as wisely as I can.
Backlinks – Life Blood Or A Waste Of Time?
If you study SEO techniques – methods to rank your content higher up in the search results – there is almost unanimous agreement that you should spent at least half your time writing posts, and the other half getting links to your site.
Google views links leading to your website as “votes” for your site – making your website appear more authoritative, and thus raising your website pages to higher up in the search results.
Links that include your keyword would give even more weight by Google – so if you’re a website looking to do me a favor, you can post a link like this: Cheap Affiliate Marketing. And yes, I’d love it. The fact that the link is using the keywords “cheap,” “affiliate,” and “marketing” could only help me.
But there’s one maverick affiliate marketer out there, Ricky; you’ll find him on Youtube, and he runs a membership site that teaches affiliate marketing – who makes the opposite claim… that while backlinks are valuable – its MORE worth your time to spend it on making content rich posts, and not spending the time to get backlinks.
Moving forward in time, I’m going to agree with him – and the simple reason is that Google’s algorithms are getting smarter and smarter. They no longer need to “count” backlinks to see what content is more worthwhile – they are heavily invested in AI – artificial intelligence, and can more directly figure out what websites are more content rich and worthwhile.
Indeed, it’s gotten to the point where the wrong sort of backlinks will penalize your website. If Google catches you paying for backlinks, or using backlink farms, your ranking will go down, not up. I predict that no more than 5 years from now – backlinks will be a thing of the past. They may have a small benefit in the eyes of Google, but Google’s AI will be more directly viewing the richness and accuracy of your content.
Google isn’t really stupid – they are constantly redesigning their algorithms to better find the perfect results for a given question. Is the best result always the one with the most backlinks going to it? OF COURSE NOT! And Google knows this. So as Google improves it’s ability to find great content – you’ll be ahead of the game if you just begin with great content that helps people in your given niche.
So while my previous websites have all heavily been helped with backlinking efforts, this website, Cheap Affiliate Marketing – will not directly seek out, or attempt in any way to get backlinks. I know that my “authority” will be directly affected by a lack of backlinks according to SEO tools – but my traffic doesn’t come from them – it comes from search engines – and if search engine AI is favorably impressed by the detail and depth of my coverage of Affiliate Marketing, then traffic will come.
Build Good Content, And The Traffic Will Come…
Now, it’s entirely possible that Ricky is wrong, and more traditional SEO experts are right, but I’m putting my website where my thinking is – and my thinking is that you can’t fool Google.
At least for very long…
Google has gotten where it is today by doing just one thing right – put the very best content up front to answer what someone types into the search bar. Google has been constantly improving their ability to find the very best websites answering the question you ask…
… and I think that the best way to move forward and get the traffic that Google supplies is to help Google – and become the very best resource in a particular niche that you can be.
What Does Google Say About Backlinking?
But let’s ask Google’s Bard – Google’s AI. I simply asked Google’s Bard: “Write an essay on which is better – good content or backlinks.”
This is the relevant portion of what it replied:
Good Content vs Backlinks: Which is Better for SEO?
Introduction
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there are two main factors that can affect your website's ranking: content and backlinks. Content is the information that you provide on your website, while backlinks are links from other websites to yours.
So, which is more important for SEO: good content or backlinks?
The answer is that both are important, but good content is ultimately more important. Backlinks can help to improve your website's ranking, but they are only as good as the content that they are linking to. If you have a website with great content, but no backlinks, it will still be able to rank well in search results. However, if you have a website with poor content, even a lot of backlinks will not be able to help you rank well.
Why is Good Content More Important than Backlinks?
There are a few reasons why good content is more important than backlinks for SEO. First, search engines like Google are constantly working to improve their algorithms so that they can provide users with the most relevant results. One of the ways that they do this is by assessing the quality of the content on a website. If a website has high-quality content that is relevant to the user's search query, it is more likely to rank well in search results.
Second, backlinks are not as reliable as they used to be. In the past, it was possible to artificially inflate a website's ranking by buying backlinks from low-quality websites. However, Google has become more sophisticated in its algorithm and is now able to identify and penalize websites that use these tactics.
Finally, good content can help to attract visitors to your website even if it does not rank well in search results. If you have informative and engaging content, people will be more likely to share it on social media and link to it from their own websites. This can help to improve your website's ranking over time.Well, there you have it folks, right from Google’s own AI engine. And it can only become less and less worthwhile to build backlinks in the future – as Google not only recognizes how easily backlinks can be manipulated – but is also becoming far more competent at recognizing good content, and rewarding that good content with higher placement in the results of a search. So how many backlinks should you have is going to change in the future – I’m quite convinced.
It makes no sense for Google to become better at recognizing backlinks designed to fool them when their ultimate goal is better reached by simply improving their ability to recognize good content. So the time spent creating backlinks (that will increasingly be disregarded by Google and other search engines) could be far more profitably used by creating longer and more informative content for your readers.
When you create your website, you can view the pros & cons of spending time creating backlinks to your site, and you may come to the opposite conclusion that I did. I think there’s room for disagreement. Perhaps I just despise the time spent doing backlinks – and to be honest, I have in the past paid others to do more of the backlinking work – so maybe I just don’t want either the extra work OR the money going out… but as for me, if I get backlinks – they will be purely organic.
Organic Links…
Speaking of which – did you know you can do both? Provide great content AND have people linking to you organically? Case studies, unique research or experiments that no-one else has done, tables of information that would be difficult for others to match, in depth tutorials, these are all things that attract organic links.
Known as “link magnets,” this is the ultimate goal for a blogger – creating content so excellent that other people want to link to it. See if you can make it a goal for your website to have a link magnet on it… it may take days or weeks of work – but you only have to do it once!
Summary…
Yes… it’s best to spend the time getting links – and no, as someone going into my retirement – I have no desire to waste the time I could spend writing engaging content.
The answer to the question How Many Backlinks Should You Have may well be decided by how old you are! 😀 If you’re a young’un – you’ve got the time, build the backlinks.
If you’re not drawing Social Security – or about to … you’re a young’un… own it!
If you’re like me, and you don’t have too many decades left in you – writing engaging content is probably a better use of your time. Backlinks are important, but good engaging content is even more important.
How about you? What are your thoughts?
