Many SEO experts will tell you content is king. My tests have shown this is B.S.
This article is contrary to popular advice, but it is also correct. I will not tell you the names of sites. I have to protect them as they are not mine. But I will tell you why, based on facts that I have learned, one way links are more important than site content.
Here’s the deal I have recently started working for a new client because their pages couldn’t seem to get to the first page of Google so I took the challenge and went to work for them.
As with any new client I take a look at what they’re already doing and I was appalled they even were able to get the rankings they currently had. The pages were ill-written, nasty and lacked clarity. It seems that some one who does not know English has ventured it. Some of it even looked like it had been spun from a content spinner and not well-written human variations of each sentence but a cheap piece of crap article spinning software.
Due to poor keyword research by the previous SEO guy many of these pages were attempting to compete for very competitive keywords.
Sadly, a middle schooler could duplicate his work very easily using a free article spinner from download.com and a few minutes of his or her time.
The internal site structure was all messed up, the internal links had things like ‘home’ as anchor text, there was no sitemap, and I don’t even want to get into the trashy incoming links from other sites.
If Google or any search engine for that matter was properly optimizing content then obviously the page results that show up as top results just would never happen. So I continued my research and what did I find?
Each of these websites had tons of one way links leading to them, though they were often spam like links from untrustworthy websites. Next I took a look at their poorly ranking pages to see if there were problems immediately apparent and sure enough there were because these pages had no or very few incoming links.
After copying links from the other pages, it only took two weeks to get my clients’ website on the first page of a Google search results for every single site I did for them.
I did this mainly to prove a point to them and get fast results and now am going back to get them quality links from power, authority domains so their sites will have staying power in their first page rankings.
They’ve entrusted their SEO needs to me, and I’ve found that the best way to maximize SEO using web 2.0 marketing blog tactics with lots of links.