Thread: Content vs Backlinks??

Originally Posted by Commandtree1985

A happy medium between content and links is always desirable. But whereas I have complete control over my own websites and favour a content heavy approach, many of my clients simply do not care about building content, they just want to get ranked for their keywords and fast.

A site needs both content and links. In my opinion a site will do better on a domain that already had backlinks. This way the content will rank better and bring more traffic. A some point you will reach a critical mass and your money will be better spent on content development with less resources devoted to link building.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

The deep backlinks are a catch 22 when you run an e-commerce. Some products are removed from the wholesaler catalogs or keyword/keyphrase categories change, etc.
I took some time to ask a few directories to update my deeplinks and they never responded to my requests. So now, I am not submitting anymore my deeplinks to them.

I know it is tricky, but wasting a lot of time to build deeplinks and consider that they will be efficient for a short period of the time, is not what I really want for my site.

e-commerce is a little more tricky. It's still possible to deeplink to articles or a blog that appears on the site.

Do you do a 301 redirect when you remove the product pages from the site?

Yes, I do 301 redirect via my htaccess file, this is a special module for ASP. They created a very useful tool at: ISAPI_Rewrite 3 - Apache .htaccess mod_rewrite compatible module for IIS

Anyway, you are right beside on site articles and blogs there is not much you can do for e-commerce deep backlinks.

I'm starting to think content.

A recently published website (Nov) went straight to PR3 in the recent PR update. The site currently has 5 backlinks.

The content is well written and very unique.

First good content, than niche link building.

There's a lot of good arguments for both the content and the backlinks. You will need both. So really the question is whether you do the link building or content creation first. I go with the linkbuilding. The content is going to get indexed and ranked a lot faster on a site that already has link juice. Also, when you jump of with revenue, it motivates you to create more content. A site without the link juice may take a few months or more to start giving you some revenue.

I am not very experienced so my words are maybe not the best advice,but i think that if you can,you should do it somehow 50/50
Good content and good links,thats the way to go,in my opinion at least

My strategy is creating content first, see how the search engines rank the article and then add progressively links (internal and external) until you rich a decent ranking.

You should do both

For me the links should be placed on relevant sites, but by an ultimate fate, if the keywords to less than 1 million pages on google as a result, Google takes all the links as well. Certainly not to spam sites.