Backlinks quantity vs quality: Which is better for SEO?

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Welcome to the newsletter that’s here to help you decide whether you will focus on quality or quantity of backlinks.

Sometimes, the most common SEO advice that you will find on every site out there is not the reality.

Which is why you should always test things for yourself before taking them as downright gospel.

One of those things for me was always reading stuff like “one very high quality backlink is better than 5 low quality backlinks”.

For example:

Website A - about home decor - gets one very high quality backlink from a large DA 90 home decor website with millions of visitors per month. It cost $500 to get that backlink.

Website B - about home decor - gets 5 medium quality backlinks from 5 different home decor websites whose domain authority ranges in between DA 40 - DA 70. These sites while not as big to have millions of monthly visits, get a fair share of traffic above 10k visits per month for each of them. It cost $500 to get all the 5 backlinks.

Which option between the two above would you rather have?

As an SEO professional with 14 years of experience, my answer will always be Website B.

And yes, that means I’d rather be on the quantity side of this argument. 

Here is why:

1. Quality is relative. While more doesn’t mean better, less doesn’t mean better either.

The quality meter has a range of 0-100.

I would never advice you to get backlinks from sites on the lower range of that scale. For me, websites between the domain authority of 0-10 are low in quality. 

Don’t get too many backlinks from websites in this range. Although a few of them would be great for diversification, so they can’t hurt.

Websites with domain authority between 20-70 are medium authority. In some niches, a very credible and contextual site (e.g a medical site written by a doctor) with DA 20 can be a very high quality website as well.

Websites with domain authority between 70-100 are high authority. They are also very expensive and difficult to get backlink opportunities on.

I prefer to build backlinks where the scenario plays out that 80% of those backlinks came from the 20-70 cohort. 

They will be a good number for the cost of time and money as compared to doing 1 or 2 between 70-100.

In this case, you don’t settle for low quality, you just settle for lower quality than the ideal DA 90 website - or as I’ve said, medium quality.

And there is an importance of numbers in backlinks.

2. Google says quality but data shows quantity

In the past I would build 2 or 3 super high quality backlinks after going through so much trouble. Only for my rankings to remain the same.

Yes, I’m going to say it. Google doesn’t mean it when they say do quality over quantity.

Perhaps the best i can think of is that they mean do good quality, but in higher quantities.

The day we started shifting our mentality to earning more backlinks in the medium authority range is the day we unlocked traffic for our clients.

Plug in any top ranking page in your Ahrefs, and compare with the lower ranking pages.

You will see that in most cases, the more backlinks a page has, the higher its authority and the better its rankings.

My personal experience says do better quality backlinks in higher quantities. One very high quality backlink will never move the needle for your traffic.

If you doubt it, test and share with me your findings down the line.

Do you agree with my experience? Let me know your thoughts in your replies.

Until next time, have a good one!
The Growth Grind team,
Part of Click Raven Inc.