The Content vs. Links Debate … Again

Photo by mamjodh

The ongoing debate about what to focus on, content or links, has heated up again this week.

Many people are confused by this whole issue, but they need not be. I want to state my opinion and experience on this issue and hopefully help alleviate people’s confusion.

Courtney Tuttle’s “Content Has Never Been King” Post

The controversy started up with Courtney posting his belief that link building is more important than content. This post engendered a lot of great comments and discussion. Unfortunately, I can’t link to it, because Courtney has taken it down.

Courtney’s “Content IS King” Post

Courtney recently posted again, stating that he has changed his mind, and that Content Is King. Why did he change his mind? He says that he realized that a crummy site can be crushed by Google. He also stated that people were taking his “keyword sniping” terminology the wrong way and thinking that all they needed was a poor-quality but keyword-targeted site and a lot of links.

I don’t believe that Courtney ever meant by “keyword sniping” that your site could be of low quality and still do well. Courtney’s internet marketing blog has always had high quality posts. I did not know about his KeywordSniper.com site, which is now closed, so I can’t comment about that.

I do have strong opinions about the content/links debate, which I will get into, later in this post.

Anyway, I believe that the reason that Courtney not only posted this “Content Is King” post but also closed down his Keyword Sniper site and removed the keyword sniping posts from his blog, is that his blog has suddenly plummeted in the Google rankings. He does not even rank on the first page of results for his name or his blog’s name any more, a sure sign that Google is not happy with him.

He is not de-indexed, though. You can still find him in Google with the “site:” command.

Vic’s Response to Court’s “Content Is King” Post

Vic of Blogger Unleashed posted a video response to Courtney’s latest post, which you can watch and form your own opinion on. Basically, I believe Vic’s point is that link building is still more important than content.

I have learned a lot from Vic and he is a friend. But that does not mean that I always agree with him. On this point, I disagree.

Here is my take on this issue.

You Need Good Content

If you are putting in the work to create a website or blog, you might as well put in a little more effort and create good content, because that way, you will be sure that your site will last. Poor, unhelpful, or spammy sites will eventually get listed lower or even kicked out of the search engine listings. And you will not get much direct traffic either, if your content is poor.

But you don’t need a great quantity of content – i.e. lots of pages – you need good quality content.

The Importance of Keywords

Court mentioned that a few of the posts on his blog brought in most of the traffic. This is the same situation with my blog.

Why do just a few posts bring in most of the traffic? Because these posts contain the information people are searching for.

You can write a high quality post about something that few people care about, and you will not get much traffic. But write about something that a lot of people want to know, and you have the potential for large amounts of traffic.

This is why doing keyword research is so important. This will tell you what people are searching for.

Not only will keyword research tell you what information people want, it will tell you the exact words they are using to search for it. You might be writing about a topic that people want to know about, but if you don’t use the words they are using, you are less likely to be found.

But my saying that keywords are important does not mean that you can write an unhelpful, keyword-stuffed post, and expect good results. You need to give good information, or you will not get people’s interest, nor will you get good rankings from the search engines.

You might get good rankings for your poor-quality site for a while, but your tricks will catch up to you eventually. Here’s an apt quote from Charles Heflin:

Google is famous for allowing people to game their system (for a while) and then come down with an elbow off the top rope leaving you buried under the mat. Why does Google do this?

Because they need time to research, explore, document, theorize, whiteboard present, calculate and ultimately dominate… That’s right, Google will let you rise to the top for a while just so they can plan your take-down (and everyone else like you).

You can fool Google for a while, but not forever. If your business model involves creating lots of poor quality sites, then you might not care if some of them get taken down, but you will have to keep building new ones. I personally would rather build sites that last.

The Importance of Links

So does this mean all you have to do is create a quality site, and you will get traffic? (“Build it and they will come…”) No. You can have the greatest site in the world, but if no one knows about it, it does not do you any good.

You have to get traffic somehow. You can either pay for it by advertising (such as using AdWords), or you can get links.

Links do two things for you:

1. They bring you direct traffic when people follow the links.

2. They tell the search engines that people like your site, so you will get ranked higher in the search engine results, bringing you traffic. (Note: This is a simplistic explanation which I will expand upon a little.)

Regarding point #2, there are many different kinds of links. Some are valuable and some are not. Valuable in the search engines’ eyes, that is.

There are links that will bring you direct traffic through people clicking the link but will not help you with the search engines. There are links that will help you with the search engines but not bring much direct traffic. And some links will do both.

The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, trying to count what they consider “good” links and not count “bad” ones. So the definition of good and bad links is constantly changing.

Either you can spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest SEO information, or you can use some common sense, when trying to decide what are “good” or “bad” links for you to get. The ins and outs of this could be the subject for a whole series of posts, so I will not try to discuss that in detail now.

The important thing to remember is that you need people to find out about your site. You need to spend time promoting it. And you should do your promotion in more high-quality ways, getting good links from high-quality sites, social networking (without spamming the social networks), etc. Link building is important, but you must do it in the right way.

In Conclusion

The bottom line is, both content and links are important. And so are keywords.

Create good content about the keywords that people are searching for.

And get good quality links to promote your site.

That’s the path to success.

What do you think? I would love to hear your opinions.

- Pat Doyle