How many links does my website need?

It’s fair to say that the most frequently asked questions we get at Hive19 lie in the quality over quantity debate. From ‘how many links do I need?’ to ‘I want X referring domains per month’ – the focus, in my opinion, is on the wrong bit.

A link is indeed a link, however the important part is the referring website itself – and the authority / topical relevance it can provide to your page.

To use an analogy (stick with me), when you buy a train ticket – do you want the little card with the destination printed on it, or to be in the destination you have paid to visit? In that case, a link is in fact not just a link, but a connection to an online entity that will benefit your website by association.

Since my early days learning internet marketing at experiencedays.co.uk, it was clear that quality would always prevail. Now, way back then the search engines may not have quite been able to understand what separated the good from the bad quite like they can today, but doing something for the search engine’s sake always seemed short sighted.

Especially, I thought, given the horror stories of core updates putting companies out of business overnight when they gambled all their chips on unscrupulous methods.

In this blog post, I’d like to address why although volume of referring domains is important (more of a good thing isn’t bad, is it?), the best strategy for growth should be to focus on the quality and relevance of the links you can acquire.

History of link building

You don’t need me to explain that marketers, on the whole, are aiming to put their product in front of their target demographic – for a fee charged to the client. The game was flipped on its head when Google emerged, and gave the entire world on a platform – influenced in part by links (which anyone can create).

From 2003 until today (2024), the game of cat and mouse has seen multiple upgrades and updates to Google’s algorithms, with the most impactful to link building detailed below:

March 2024: Core Update

• Integrated the Helpful Content Updates (HCU) into the core algorithms, aiming to reduce unhelpful content in search results by 40%.

October 2023: Spam Update

• Officially, this update improved spam detection in a number of non-English-speaking markets.

September 2023: Helpful Content Update

• The third official Helpful Content Update (first of 2023), with industry consensus that this hit harder than the previous two, possibly in the wake of AI-generated content.

December 2022: Link Spam Update

• A targeted Link Spam Update incorporating the ‘SpamBrain’ AI system.

December 2022: Helpful Content Update

• Overlapped with the Link Spam Update, making the separation of impacts between the two extremely difficult.

November 2021: Spam Update

• A broad spam update, which unlike the July update, was not labelled “Link Spam” and the details of which were vague.

July 2021: Link Spam Update

• A broad algorithm update across multiple languages, targeting as the name states ‘Link Spam’.

September 2016: Penguin 4.0

• The rollout of the new, “gentler” Penguin algorithm, which devalues bad links instead of penalising sites.

October 2015: RankBrain*

• Revelation that machine learning had been a part of the algorithm for months, contributing to the 3rd most influential ranking factor.

July 2012: Link Warnings

• Google sent out a large number of unnatural link warnings via Google Webmaster Tools, and then announced that these new warnings may not actually represent a serious problem.

April 2012: Penguin

• The “over-optimisation penalty” became the “Webspam Update” – dubbed “Penguin”. This adjusted a number of spam factors, including keyword stuffing.

June 2012: May 39-Pack

• The 39 changes in May, including Penguin improvements, better link-scheme detection, changes to title/snippet rewriting, and updates to Google News.

October 2005: Jagger

• Targeting low-quality links, including reciprocal links, link farms, and paid links.

February 2005: Allegra

• As well as speculation as to whether Allegra affected the Sandbox or the LSI, many speculated that Google was beginning to penalise suspicious links.

January 2005: Nofollow

• Combating spam, and controlling outbound link quality, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft collectively introduce the “nofollow” attribute to clean up devalue unvouched for links.

February 2004: Brandy

• Introduction of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), as well as deeper focus on increased anchor text relevance, link “neighbourhoods” and major development of keyword analysis.

April 2003: Cassandra

• Cracked down on basic link-quality issues, including excessive linking from co-owned domains, hidden text and hidden links.

Timeline courtesy of Moz.

Why relevance

Fundamentally, a link should benefit the user. Its sole purpose is to make it easier to complete a purchase, or get the information that will ultimately lead to one. Google built its platform on this pretence, and hasn’t stopped refining its algorithms to better understand the context of links since.

It’s estimated that Google has indexed somewhere in the region of 400 billion webpages. Now, I’m no mathematician – but that’s a big number. The golden egg for Google, therefore, was to programme an engine that could understand the connection between that many pages, and then create a reward system that would deliver the most relevant of those pages for any given search term.

Links have always played a big part in that reward system, which has provided marketers a way to manipulate the results. Just like every game of cat and mouse in evolutionary history, algorithms grew wiser, and marketers have employed new tricks. However, in 2024, it’s safe to assume that algorithms and AI, if they haven’t already, will surpass the intelligence of the average marketer. So, no more tricks, in reality.

It’s much harder to gain an advantage without good old fashioned hard work now.

So, if all that is left now is to actually provide value – it stands to reason that creating a presence for your brand where your peers and target demographic are most likely to be is a wise strategy. And, therefore, a link is not just a link, but a connection to a website that aligns with your own.

Providing value to a reader on one website, who, by proxy should have at least a fleeting interest in the content and services on your page or website.

Quality vs. quantity

As I touched on in the intro to this post, the dichotomy of quality v quantity is a delicate balance, as the natural inclination to be swayed by more is tempting. But, if we shift the focus from the link itself to the referring domain hosting the all important reference to your web page, it becomes easier to understand.

Over the years, we’ve helped hundreds of clients, prospects and acquaintances to understand their backlink profile, and form individual strategies to maximise their online visibility. During that time, we’ve naturally conducted many audits to assess what might be valuable, what might be meaningless – and what should probably be discussed.

The one constant, since my earliest understanding of link building (it’s not rocket science) is that good quality websites providing good quality content will always be much more valuable than low quality websites providing low quality content. Genius, I know.

If you have a set budget to win the Touring Cars championship, would you rather have 10 Ford Fiestas, or 1 Ferrari? OK, that’s probably oversimplifying it – and the answer is in fact 10 Ferraris, but the point remains. Focus on quality, and quantity will look after itself.

Examples of client growth

There are many ways to measure success, but ultimately (and the one I always stress to clients & prospects) it comes to down rankings and traffic. Yes, if the Domain Rating (DR), Domain Authority (DA) and Trust Flow (TF) are increasing it is a good sign – but unless the keyword rankings are also moving, it’s not truly successful.

There are many variables that might influence the rate of ranking improvements, not least the competitiveness of the terms and the activity of your competitors. However, in my experience a targeted content strategy backed up by a relevance-based authority building one will lead to positive change for your most valuable pages.

The below screenshots are of different clients in different niches, who we have worked on for 3 years (from scratch) and less than 1 year respectively. Now, these aren’t taken from Analytics so I’d advise taking them with a tiny pinch of salt, however the progress is evident.

Client 1:

Image 1, taken from Ahrefs when the campaign started (see how long ago it was, the interface has updated since):

Now, these are relatively small volumes of keywords and organic traffic – but from an almost zero starting point, the client now has a relatively strong DA, and ranking on the first page for a number of the most valuable terms:

This is also backed up by Majestic, where you can see the relevance for the client is uniform (and on point for the industry):

Client 2:

Image 1, taken from Ahrefs back at the of Summer 2023:

Now, evidently the biggest leap here is the traffic (a 500% + increase) alongside a small increase to the DR. By comparison the leap from 74 to 75 DR doesn’t seem as big… but given that it is a logarithmic scale, is still quite significant – especially given the increases to keywords and traffic.

Again, this can be seen in the Trust Flow, where the client has seen a large leap from a starting point of 17 along with less topically relevant categorisation fields.

To stress, these are just third party metrics and do not mean everything, but they do demonstrate positive change, especially when the search results reflect that too.

Examples of good link building

Of course, there are thousands of high quality links out there assisting users and interlinking the web for search engines’ benefit. To demonstrate just a tiny handful, here are a few from Hive19’s backlink profile that demonstrate relevance within the industry, and high quality placement.

The key factors that make these good quality links, in my opinion are:

• Relevance to the industry
• Relevance of content to the website, and the linked page
• The purpose of the website: a business with their own service and relevant traffic
• Keyword rankings for key terms and relevant organic traffic
• The quality of the other content on the website
• Quality and relevance of links into the domain

View article: Advertising Week

“Advertising Week is a worldwide gathering of marketing, advertising, technology and brand professionals.”

Here, Head of Content & Outreach Maxine Bremner provided an expert piece for Advertising Week, sharing insight on understanding the risks and opportunities for marketers adopting AI. This is a good example of brand building, using branded anchor text to link to the homepage of Hive19.

The article was written by Maxine, and leverages her expertise from working here, and therefore a very natural link between the two topically relevant websites is created.

View case study: Pitchbox x Hive19

“Pitchbox is an Influencer Outreach & Content Marketing Platform for brands, digital marketing agencies and growth hackers.”

Another very natural link, this time from industry leading software provider Pitchbox – who conducted a case study interview with us in 2023. Here, we shared insight on our use of the Pitchbox platform and how it has helped Hive19 to scale and become the link building agency we are today.

Naturally, a reference back to the website is completely logical – and extremely topically relevant for the industry.

View article: BuzzSumo

“BuzzSumo is the go-to content marketing tool for creators worldwide. Today, thousands of businesses use BuzzSumo to create brilliant content, monitor their brand and industry, and discover growth opportunities.”

Finally, another highly topically relevant link from another of the industry-leading software providers – this time a deep link into our HiveRank® system. Again, another expert thought piece provided by Maxine is the reason for the link to exist, sharing insight into many of the best tools for PR link building (and including HiveRank® alongside them for further authority building.

Examples of bad link building

…not going to call anybody out here, because that’s poor form. However, I would say that a few tell tale signs of poor link building often include:

With the naked eye:

• The editorial has little or no relevance to the website it is published on
• Other recently published article also bear little relevance to the website
• Poorly written content within published articles
• The link to the client website has little or no relevance to the publishing website
• Lack of internal links to other pages on the publishing website
• Overly keyword optimised anchor text
• Lack of other reference links within the editorial
• The website exists to publish content, and has no additional value

With software tools:

• Low / imbalanced authority metrics
• Sharp spikes or a decline in organic traffic
• Thousands upon thousands of linked domains
• Proximity to other websites in a network (PBN)

The future of link building

As I mentioned in my previous blog on the HCU update and what it means for link building, the future for good quality content marketing is stronger than ever.

By focusing on relevance and providing value to your user, the algorithms’ clamp down on spam and low quality link building in order to trick the system is a good thing. When you provide actual value to a website, and enhance a user’s journey or experience online – that should, and would be rewarded, just like any other recommendation.

Recommendations are key to many transactions in the real world, and especially online – as is good quality advertising. The future of link building, therefore, in my opinion treads the fine line between associating your brand’s website with topically relevant key players, and adds value to the user’s experience by not only making your product or service more visible in search results, but also to your target demographic in the an industry-specific ecosystem.

In short, the future of link building is quality, relevance and with the user at the forefront of the strategy.

100 Ford Fiestas or 10 Ferraris?

I managed to reduce Google’s infinitely complicated algorithms into analogies about train tickets and Ferraris, which is ironic given the speed with which good quality link building I’ve been insisting upon goes at. Without hammering the point too much, the type of link building that will make a difference to your website is a value exchange, which naturally involves people, time and a lot of effort.

If volume remains your key metric, ask yourself this: If your budget was 10x what you currently have, would you want 10x the volume of links (100 Ford Fiestas) or would you shift your focus to quality (10 Ferraris)? If it’s the latter, my suggestion is to start with 1 and build up to 10 – because your budget might just grow along the way.

Let’s discuss your backlink profile

I love looking into clients’ and prospects’ backlink profiles to advise and devise organic growth strategies, so if you would like to know more more about your backlink profile and organic potential – please get in touch:

Email me
Book a meeting with me
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