Here’s an extremely common question that I’m asked almost daily, either in comments or by email: How many links does it take to get ranked #1 in Google?
There’s no easy way to answer this question but we’re going to do our best. Here’s the only way it can be answered – it depends 100% on the keyword. For a keyword that isn’t competitive at all, it might take 1. For a keyword that’s super competitive, it might take 100,000,000.
If you want to figure this out for any keyword, this is the process that I’d go through:
1. Search for the keyword in Google and save the top 4 sites that come up.
2. Go to Yahoo and do a link domain search on each (search for linkdomain:eachurlhere.com). Yahoo will then list all of the pages that are linking to each URL.
3. Note the total number of inlinks shown. This is the number that you will probably have to beat, but to be more accurate you will have to also follow the next step.
4. Check the PageRank of each page that’s linking to your competitors’ pages. Count the number of links that have certain PageRank numbers. After you complete this process you should know how many pages have PR10, how many have PR9, how many have PR8, how many have PR7, how many have PR6, how many have PR5, how many have PR4, how many have PR3, how many have PR2, how many have PR1, and how many have PR0.
If you want to get ranked #1 in Google, you will basically need to beat your competition and that means you will have to first match what they have in their link profile and then beat them.
Let’s say that after checking your competitors’ links you find that the strongest site has 3 PR3 links, 15 PR2 links, 57 PR1 links, and 120 PR0 links. In order to beat them, you will need 4 PR3 links, 15 PR2 links, 57 PR1 links, and 120 PR0 links. Note: the best way to ensure a #1 ranking is to get more of the strongest PR links they have, and then match everything else. An alternative method for beating this site would be to get three PR3 links, 15 PR2 links, 57 PR1 links, and 250 PRO links. When you’re trying to move past a site by getting more PR0 links, you generally have to beat the number by a larger amount.
Overall guys this process isn’t that hard. You have to map out what your competitor has going and then beat it.
Those of you who are looking for a fast way to add up these numbers can use SEO Elite. It will gather this information for you. Those of you that need to save some money can just count them up manually – SEO Elite isn’t cheap ($167 SEO Elite is now $47 per month).
Tags: google, offsite SEO, SEO
I wish more bloggers would start sharing their strategies. This is great and I am going to follow this to the T. Thanks again!
SEO Elite is now a monthly $47 service for the software. So its a lot more expensive that it was…
Brad Callen jumping on the new ‘Guru’ bandwagon of continuity programs.
Unfortunately, an essential tool.
Whoops! Thanks Dave I just fixed that in the post.
Hey Im not seeing where this is $47 a month? I still show its $169 one time fee. Is there something I’m missing here?
Click on the link above in the last paragraph and scroll down to the payment….its there in black and white…well red… $47 a month.
I clicked through all the way to the payment form for clickbank and it shows $167 one time fee for me.
I’m guessing you guys have caught him in the middle of a split test. If you clear your cookies between each visit to the site I’d guess you’ll eventually see both pricing options.
Just pay whichever price suits you best…
I’m sure marketers have a hard time split testing when their prospects are all chatting in the comments sections of blogs.
Mark is right. He seems to be doing a split test.
$167 paid in full:
http://www.seoelite.com/index1.htm
$47 monthly subscription fee:
http://www.seoelite.com/index2.htm
I haven’t gone over the $47 per month sales page in any detail, but I didn’t really notice any compelling reason to go with that option.
Is it possible that Google will slap your site and it doesn’t matter how many backlinks you have?
I found some great free online services that do exactly what you state is necessary as far as showing competitors and their link’s page ranks. Also Shoemoney Tools has a pretty good banklink tool.
You can get all of it by looking in Yahoo and then using the Google Toolbar, it just takes a lot longer…
What about SEO for Firefox? I’ve used a similar Firefox plugin for a while and I love it. It really streamlines all this research. It’s free and can be found by searching for “seo for firefox” in Google.
Great advice Court… AGAIN! Thanks. By reading and applying what you teach, I’m finally making money with my internet marketing.
Holy shit Batman! I agree with some of the other commenters that say I wish that more bloggers would tell us their secrets. This is an awesome post and I’m definitely going to look back at it.
For a quick, no-frills way of seeing a sites PR, # of backlinks, keyword density, etc… I use a FireFox plugin called SeoQuake. I’ve heard good things and bad things about it. Nothing comes close to SEO Elite though.
Hey Norm – Chip – What are we calling you now anyway?
SEO Quake does a good job. So does SEO for Firefox. As you say, though, SEO Elite puts it all together a lot more quickly and easily than those tools.
My parents did that name thing to me before I was old enough to have a say. The trick would be to do a post on it and somehow work my keywords into it… How NOT to design a child’s name : )
Hi Court, great stuff. Do links from directories still count? Do we need to submit our blogs/ sites to directories as well?
Juzz yes they absolutely still count. If you go back to where you actually get placed in the directories you’ll find that most of the links are PR0, so take that into consideration.
Court, thanks for sharing this method. I have one question, though. How do you adjust your target numbers when a) the page you’re trying to outrank isn’t optimized for the keyword you’re looking to rank for and your page is; or b) the page you’re trying to outrank doesn’t have a lot of links to it from anchor texts containing the keyword phrase but yours will; or c) the site you’re competing against is a much older site than yours. It seems that the method you outlined would be most accurate when all these other factors are about the same, but that some adjustments might be in order when they’re not. Are there rough estimates or adjustments we could use?
For example, I have a relatively new site related to teeth whitening. I purchased a domain name that’s about 1 year old and that has part of my keyword phrase in it. I used one of your wordpress themes for the site and its very optimized for my keyword phrase. For the keyword I’m targeting, I’m up against a couple of sites with the following numbers:
Site A (PR2): 240 backlinks [235 PR0, 3 PR1, 1 PR3, 1 PR4]; Domain Age = 10 years; No optimiztion for the keyword; No baclinks at all from any anchor texts containing the keyword phrase or variations of it. The page is a subdomain. The main domain has 14000 backlinks to it.
Site B (PR2): 599 backlinks [560 PR0, 9 PR1, 18 PR2, 7 PR3,3 PR4, 2 PR6]; Domain age = <1 year; No optimization for the keyword; Only 34 backlinks are from anchor texts containing a variation of the keyword phrase [31 PR0, 2 PR1, 1 PR3].
By comparison, my site (PR0) has the following numbers:
134 backlinks [132 PR0], [2 PR1]; 111 backlinks are from anchor texts containing the keyword phrase or a variation of it.
My site is currently on page 7 of the Google search results for my keyword. It has been as high as page 4.
How would you analyze these numbers?
Thanks.
Jim
Hey Jim,
In this case you’re way behind both site A and site B. Site A’s age is going to hurt you and even though they don’t have anchored links they can still have a lot of keyword authority if it’s from the right sites. For example, if the sites in question cover similar topics the authority is created without the right anchors.
Since I don’t know if the domain was indexed when you bought it, I couldn’t tell you how much of a disadvantage you’re at as far as age.
Site B has some legitimately strong links and as far as pure PR goes, they are way ahead of you.
This stuff is hard to estimate Jim but I’d say that you’re at least 20,000 PR0 links behind so unless you’re able to find some stronger links it’s going to take you quite a while.
Getting anchored links from the wrong sites are only going to take you so far. My advice at this point would be to try to get some good links from some strong sites in your niche.
Court,
I clicked on your link to SEO Elite, it is still $167 one time payment.
https://ssl.clickbank.net/order/orderform.html?time=1229391438&vvvv=62727978656e31&item=1&titl=SEOElite&vvar=&name=&emal=&ctry=&zipc=&
This is what I’m seeing…
https://ssl.clickbank.net/order/orderform.html?time=1229428279&vvvv=62727978656e31&item=25&titl=SEOElite&vvar=&name=&emal=&ctry=&zipc=&
The only thing that I can tell would make it difeerent is that he is testing it as a split test. I am in Ireland and a friend in the USA tried and he is getting the $47 a month too so it’s not geo-targeted testing.
Court,
Your timing is spot on. I was just contemplating and strategizing on this topic this weekend. I have been using G to do my research and it is working ok. I have decided that my best course of action is to attempt to get links from pages that are sitting at a PR2 or better. Some of the sites I am competing against have a ton of links, but many of these links come from pages that G hasn’t indexed.
I’ll let y’all know how my grassroots link building campaign goes. Also, I can’t remember if you guys have discussed the “Connect Content” concept that Grizz has introduced over on his site. It sounds like a good deal and I plan to get in on it.
Keep up the good work, we appreciate all of the guidance you (and Mark) provide.
Great read. The linkdomain:url.com throws me off a bit. It only seems to work on the TLD itself and not on deep linked pages or sub domains.
For instance it will work on something like mydomainname.com but not on 123.mydomainname.com or mydomainname.com/link-to-page-in-question.
Am I doing something wrong or is it a limitation of the code?
Once again, great info! I’m in a small niche market, but I can see how the competition has me beat both in the age of the domain, and probably in keywords as well as backlinks. I spent at least an hour last night looking at the backlinks for the top ranked site in my niche. I realized that I could be a lot more diligent in my search for links. I also realized the competition has expanded “our” niche and bought up a couple of other domains with just a bit of content to link to them. My web store is generated by a database, so I have those gobbelty-gook URL’s to fight against as well.
Hi Court,
Thanks again for a great SEO post!
A few questions:
a) Why would you just look at links? Isn’t it the keywords in those link texts that really matter?
b) Linkdomain: will also give you internal links to that page from the same domain. Do internal links count? And if yes how much?
c) How long does it take (approx.) Google to notice new links and assign new Keyword Authority to links?
Thanks for any answers Court!
SeoQuake tip: Install SeoQuake in Firefox and turn on SeoQuake for Yahoo SiteExplorer. When you do the Linkdomain search in Yahoo now, you will get the PageRank for each link!
-LinkMeister
Hi Court,
It seems that linkdomain also include links that are rel nofollow.
If you do a linkdomain for http://www.secondbrain.com you will see that it has a PR 5 link from Mashable.com. That loooks like an awesome link, but if you look at the actual page you will see that the link is a rel nofollow:
http://mashable.com/2008/08/13/firefox-3-social-surfing-tools/
-LinkMeister
So a backlink is another blog linking to a post?
Thanks for the tips… great information and it definitely makes sense.
This is a strategy I’ve been using for a really long time and it works brilliantly. SEO Elite is fantastic software!
First time I read a step by step procedure for keyword research. I’ll definitely use them and I’m subscribing by email.Thanks for this information.
A cheaper link analysis tool is WebComp Analyst.
$67 once off payment. Does everything that SEO Elite does, including showing the anchor text used in links.
IBLs number isn’t the only important factor in SERPs position, let’s not forget about the domain age and other factors. Sometimes even if you have more links your still won’t be nb1
I wanted to rank higher for a car rental article that I made on ehow.
Once you add up all of the backlinks and PR counts, and fix yours – how do you get google to move you up??? Does this happen automatically or do you have to do something with googlebot?
Thank you very much for the tip. I have actually tried this on one of my niche sites and it worked.
Can link building be effective for affiliate sites(with their own domain)when the site is only one page?Can you add pages to your site so Google and others find links and not have the “site map–etc”show on your landing page?
Thanks, didn’t know about “linkdomain:eachurlhere.com before, that was very helpful. I checked a few of my information niche sites and was surprised by the numbers of inbound links from sites I had never heard of before…. This keyword info will be very helpful as I research new niche markets. It doesn’t make much sense for me to try for the markets where the competition will keep me too far from page 1 to get found…
Great post as usual. I do have one concern when it comes to counting backlinks from sites.
Is the number of NoFollows going to make a huge difference in the number of backlinks one requires? Do I have to count the backlinks and keep track of the dofollows and nofollows?
I recently bought SEO Elite and must say it is a great time saver. Helps find valuable links pretty quickly. Some of the links probably won’t link to you but its great to find links.
I’m just so glad that you are sharing this info because there is so much misinformation out there. I am a paid up member of a niche blgging community whose message is…PR doesn’t matter, the size of the serach results for the keyword does. It just shows you what is going on out there at the moment
This is great information and for anyone who needs to ensure their sites are #1 in google search rankings and other search engines, these are must follows. For bloggers who aren’t yet making money, stay the course in getting your blog out there on as many sites and listed with as many area’s as possible and the more posts with unique keywords the better.
One think I have also learned to exploit is mispellings of terms in keywords, if someone mistypes a word “blueberry” as “bluberry” you may have the #137 listed page for blueberry, but the #1 for bluberry, use mistyped keywords to your advantage, it can help in some cases for common mistakes to get your site listed first.
The WebCompAnalyst was mentioned in a previous comment.Any user comments on this tool would be greatly appreciated.Thanks again.
I am using a backlink strategy by someone (not sure I can mention it on here?)and I am following the rules. Good, high PR sites but my question is…How long does it take for these high PR backlinks to make a difference in the search results? I am not impatient so if it takes weeks and weeks then fine, just an indication would be good if anyone knows?
Hey, great post. I’ve featured it on the blog.
Do links to high trffic blogs have more value with Google than other links? Thanks—Paul
I am not really follow the debate of SEOelite I have be with them and found no glory whatsoever playing SEO games with them as alternative of having SEO eilte in which just “pre -actions “I rather use direct attact in which I rather use 3waylinks that I think much much better then any other tools SEO,or this Elite SEO things that I thought ordinary tools for everyone that Should not have to be sold commercially
Nice And Great Post, Thank You
oh ya, this is one of my bookmark!
Bookmarked the page. But a question – how much does PR0 count for in terms of PR1 links? Like is 10 PR0 = 1 PR1?
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this post is an eye opener and has answered a few questons very clearly.
However i would like to know from Court whetehr inserting the adsense code can hurt your Serp ranking due to the outbound klink thereof.
I ask this because it seems I have learnt it the hard way when I was sent crashing down.
Any inputs?
How much does PR0 count towards your pagerank though? Like could you get PR1 from having a lot of PR0 links?
Thanks for the tips. Working hard tonight on SEO. By the way, how often is PR changed/updated within Google?
Perfect! I knew you had to beat them in links, but didn’t know you had to match the page ranking also. So I wonder if someone has 100 pages ranked at 1, how many pages ranked at 7 will it take to beat it?
Who does your SEO work?
Very Nice
its coplicated but worthwhile.
thanks for sharing this useful information
thanks for sharing this useful information