Forget Pagerank and Backlinks..it is your internet marketing strategy that matters…
Everywhere on the forums, I see people making a big issue with “no follow” or “do follow” links. I understand why they ask. Somewhere down the line people have become obsessed with pagerank and “do follow” links. Questions like “Zimbio is no follow…should I even bother to add a backlink to their site?” Obsessing over pagerank is not internet marketing though and those who are trying to build organic rank are, at least in this marketer’s opinion, off base.
Marketers marketing to internet marketers have really profited from this rather large niche of people by giving them backlink packets, selling them monthly subscriptions on the premise that if you add them, you will eventually rank organically. They have sold them on the fact that if they can rank organically, their worries will be over. It may be the case….then again, it may be time wasted.
The ones who have really profited from the pagerank crazy though are those that sell domains that have pagerank though.
I am going to come out and say it. While I understand that backlinks are important if you are shooting for organic rankings, if you are true marketer, you shouldn’t be worrying so much about who “follows” and who “doesn’t follow”. You should be more interested in what gives you converting traffic and what doesn’t. If that is organic listings, so be it.
Google recognizes some “no follow” links
They do, not that that really matters. If you don’t believe me, take a look at your link profile for some of your sites and see if any no follow links are in there. I am not saying that they “count” them but what I have noticed is that some “no follow” backlinks show up in my link profile and most of the time they happen to be from sites that are congruent with my theme. If they didn’t recognize them, would they be there? I don’t know about you, but how would google “see” that my “no follow” link is pointing to a certain page if they didn’t follow it?
Also, if pagerank is something that you want (god knows why but whatever), then do a little test for yourself. Create a blog and only create links that are of the “no follow” species. Do 10 “no follow” links a day and wait until the next PR update. Now, you tell me if “no follow” links affect Pagerank.
The pagerank you see is totally meaningless…
…unless you are trying to sell a website to someone who has bought the pagerank debate….
Pagerank has nothing to do with whether you can outrank a site. If it did, Grizzly’s site would not rank. It may be able to give you a rather slanted perspective into the potential competition in a market, but ultimately, how many links you have and who is linking to you will have far more impact on your organic rankings. The truth is you can get high pagerank with a huge volume of content on your site that is linked with each other internally without any backlinks coming from anywhere but your site.
But you know this already….
Whenever, I see people talk about no follow or do follow links, I really have to say that the bigger question isn’t whether the backlinks will count or not….
The bigger question is what are your intentions behind getting the link?
- If you are going for traffic and a web 2.0 property or another website can funnel targeted traffic to your site, whether this is through organic or social is irrelevant as long as it targets who you want to target, then that link is good.
- If by building a Zimbio page, it funnels 25 people a week to your site who in turn click an ad, purchase a product, sign up to a list, ect…ect…then it is worth it right?
- If by adding your site in your signature link on a private membership site, you get 20 people per week to your site who purchase a product, click an ad, ect…ect…then it is worth it, right?
- If by paying for an ad offline, you effectively drive traffic to your site which results in 20 sales and adds $200 net after cost, is it worth it? If those 20 sign up to your newsletter and you have determined that the LCV (lifetime customer value) is $1,000, is it worth it?
- If you hash a deal with another internet marketer to do a list swap and you get 200 new potential customers out of the deal, is it worth it?
- If by adding your site to digg, you get 500 visitors who DON’T do anything but you get a backlink which gives you very little backlink juice and no trustrank…is that worth it?
- Alternatively, if you add your page to digg, and you get thousands of visitors and 25 backlinks from it (all coming from different IP ranges) which in turn bring you in even more traffic and it still doesn’t convert…is it worth it? (trick question…it depends on what your strategy is).
- If by guest posting, you get 100 new visitors and 25 “stick”, is it worth it? What about if they mention you on their site?
- If by adding a link on a wikipedia listing, (which is powerful regardless in spite of the “nofollow” tag), you are getting 200 targeted visitors to your page which click on an ad, sign up to your list, purchase a product…ect… is it worth it?
- If 1 out of 100 of the visitors that happen to have a blog mention you in a post and they happened to come from a “no follow” link, is it worth it?
- If it takes you 1 year, 400 hours of work and $600 in backlinks to rank in the top 5 for a competitive niche that will reach your target market and send you 1,000 visitors a day, is it worth it?
Offline business owners who play with PPC understand this. Most don’t even try to rank their site. I mean why should they? If their strategy is to sell product, then it is only a matter of making sure that they have margin between product cost and profit. And if the cost of SEO outweighs the cost of time spent on gaining visibility (ie. link building, ect.) for their brand to their market, then why would they bother going there?
Now don’t get me wrong….organic listings are great because they will typically target your market effectively….but google isn’t the only show in town. There are too many ways to effectively reach your target market without ever having to worry about organic listings. It all depends on how you intend to make yourself visible….your internet marketing strategy will determine that.
Bloggers in particular worry about pagerank needlessly. Instead, they should be trying to figure out how to become visible to those most important in their market. (If you are a blogger and want a quick synopsis on this, you can check out my guest post over at kikolani.com.
The only point I am making is that PR doesn’t matter, and “no follow” or “do follow” doesn’t matter in the grand scale of things. What does matter is your strategy to make your site or page stick out and become visible to your target market. All the rest of the junk you read is useless rhetoric that is nothing more than more “weight” on your brain.
Like this? You may also like my Link Building Strategies Going from the bottom up….
8 Responses to “Forget Pagerank and Backlinks..it is your internet marketing strategy that matters…”
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Well, that makes perfect sense to me.
great post leo. I was just thinking about this as well, to stop putting so much emphasis and time around ranking a site – over building a site and a working strategy to get a targeted audience. These social media sites may not be good for adsense conversions but you bet you can find a targeted audience rather quickly and start on the path to success faster than the other guy spending hours on machines building backlinks and pinging search engines and blogs like crazy, waiting to rank and waiting for traffic to come to them – in the meantime, I’m out there and bringing the sheep back to my pasture, right where I want them.
I agree with the nofollow and dofollow issues. At first I was sucked in with the crowd, but as I’m building sites, studying them and working on my battle plans I’ve come to the conclusion that the end all goal is getting converting traffic, and targeted traffic doesn’t give a damn about a dofollow or a nofollow link.
@ Frankyp
I don’t want anyone to think I am saying that organic listings aren’t important. It is just too easy to think that if you have organic listings, the money will come. It is also too easy to rely on one funnel stream for traffic. I have been hard on social media because people don’t really get it. The new breed of social media marketer thinks that if they spam twitter, they will be on the fast track of making money online. The reality is that to really make it with social media, you have to have something useful that people want…..It worked that way back in the day when forums were the only social media outlet in town.
If you spam forums, chances are great you won’t get very far…you will be working on volume, not quality. However, if you have something to say that may help someone down the line, through your actions you build credibility. Most big companies use these social media platforms solely for branding purposes and reputation clean up.
Retweeting and tweeting offers and opportunities won’t cut it in the form of building rep. Besides, if you are doing what everyone else is doing, chances are you will get the same results that everyone else is getting. But you know that…and I am preaching to the choir here, right?
In ecommerce markets, there are a gazillion ways to get traffic. But the rub is that you need to find ways to reach these people that not only want it…but want it right now.
Hi Leo,
This brings up a question I have been wondering about lately. Is building a stable full of MFA sites that are organically ranked really such a good way to spend ones time?
It almost seems like a house of cards because there are so many things that can go wrong. Would it be better to concentrate on product sites that actually sell something people in order to solve a problem instead of “tricking them” into visiting your site just to click on someone else’s Google Ad?
I would imagine you will say do both but I guess the question is what is the long term marketing plan a person is working toward. This is really the crux of the problem, mapping out where a person wants to go. The problem is deciding what your 5 year plan should be when you are relatively new to this marketing medium, and marketing in general.
I really feel at times that I want a business built on the view of the forest but all I can focus on is the trees.
Thanks Leo, once again your post has made my brain hurt from thinking (I guess that means it is growing. LOL)
@ Andy
The problem with building a stable full of MFA’s and getting them ranked organically is that at any moment, Google could pull the rug out from under you. Google could also change the adsense terms of service. I am not saying not to do it…I am saying understand and account for the risks involved.
Obviously with that in mind, good content that is relative and that people within the market can relate to is a much better alternative although immediate results aren’t likely. Then again, you are speaking in years, which is what you should be speaking in. Other marketers will tell you differently though. They will say that your object should be to get them from your page to the offer quickly….make the page ugly….the content useless….don’t answer their problems….how well you convert should be the ultimate factor though. After all, it is business.
The beauty of internet marketing is that there are hundreds of different ways to actually make money online. SEO and keyword targeting is just one way, and you can make a lot of money from building a list, adwords, social traffic (well you really have to know how to target your crowd), affiliate marketing and so on. In the end what you have to do is to make the money happen – get your visitors to click the ads, buy the product or give you their e-mail address. These all can be accomplished in so many different watys, and to be honest the MFA is just an easy way to start making that income online; once you see the money it is time to diversify and diversify some more.
Targeted traffic is what you want and so it seems that long tail keyword targeting happens to be a quite simple and easily understood model to do this – the best part being that you don’t have to know much to be able to make it happen. You don’t need to be a good sales copywriter or a good marketer in any way; all you need is to find those low competition keywords and make a site with semi-good content and get a few easy links to get it ranked and have traffic.
SEO is great if you don’t have a product to sell since the ROI is great – you can invest next to nothing except your time and get a decent long term income in the form of clicks or affiliate sales. Heck if I would have a product to sell I would use every possible way to get the traffic since all the sales would make me a good amount of money, but if I am using Adsense, well getting enough social traffic to convert to clicks is just too damn time wasting. From my experience Digg users don’t click on text ads too much but in the end it all depends on your niche and your keywords.
Even so. Building a readership is something that most of the people find very hard to do – including myself – and you really have to be an expert in your niche AND know how to get people to read your posts… Be interesting?
My opinion is that you should never stick to one method. Do that one thing to the point that you are making a satisfactory online income, then switch to another internet marketing strategy and do the same for that. Once you are using a few methods and rake a full time income from each you are really making money online.
I am always wondering about your way of writing. Your articles are full of the it-is-so-obvious information, that it is unbelievable other people are still concerning on the (for example) do-no-follow stuff.
I am not internet marketer, I am just fun of the internet marketing – and always I am thinking about the way how to make money online I end up with “it is only hard work, then hard work and again hard work”. People should focus on the other people needs and ways how to solve them. And do such a content that can solve these problems. Of course, it is nice to use SEO knowledge, linkbuilding strategies, any kind of (internet) marketing strategy, but instead they ask in how many directories they should submitt site and if this link is better than other.
Once I would like to make website people like. They will find necessary information there, find solution for their problems, enjoy staying there. And – as a bonus – I can us it as a additive source of my income. However, I know it is so much work ahead that I am still thinking is better to stay with my current job and be as good as possible in it. And, anyway, I can be still fun of the internet marketing
Once again, Leo, thank you showing me that there is not only one way but rather big field of solutions and results. And we should always look at the forest not only trees (@Andy).