What to Choose - Content or Link?

Every website owner tries to impress clients with lucrative web designs, stylish themes and easy to navigate websites to gain more reliance from them. They spruce it up with rich content to make people more aware about their company & their products or services. As we all know content has always been considered as the king of internet marketing, this has encourages website owners to publish more & content on their website.

Content on the website not only provide the information about the company, their product/services but also gives more information about the “thing” visitors are searching for on the internet.

10 important things to consider while putting any content on a website:

1.     Know your audience
2.     Decide why you are writing
3.     A short & descriptive headline
4.     Avoid using UPPER CASES
5.     Choose the right words
6.     Avoid acronyms or jargons
7.     Punctuations & grammar
8.     Effective hyperlinking
9.     Right length
10.  Proof reading

In order to increase the number of webpages on the website, webmasters forgot an important aspect of the content posting i.e. to keep the originality of the content. And in haste to rank on top for various search engines; incidently they piled up a lot of duplicate content on their website.

Though it provided an increase in traffic for many website with good amount of content to offer to visitors; It also made it difficult for search engines to choose the best content due to plagiarism on many sites with the same content.

Google has always aimed to provide the best search results to anyone who searches on their platform. With the increase in duplicate content on website, Google crawlers started treating those websites as low quality websites. This took place in form of an algorithmic updated called the Panda Update which looked for similarities between websites that real humans found as of good or bad quality in terms of their originality & relevance as posed to an algorithm.

After the release of this update, websites with plagiarized content were penalized. Their webpages were de-indexed and that resulted in fall of their ranking for certain keywords. Interestingly, Panda update reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results.

As being the saviour of the digital world, Google recommended webmasters to either re-write those pages or block them from getting indexed with Google or any other search engine. This update in return brought additional value to websites having original content.

Although things got in shape with time for the websites who were penalized by adhering to the SEO guidelines. But in due course many webmaster & website owners changed their strategy to rank on top of search results from content farming to link building.

As we all know, backlinks to any website is an important factor in calculating the Pagerank of the website. People started doing rigorous link building & promoting their keywords screeching way over the permissible limit set by Google’s SEO Guidelines.

With the help of many black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking, spam link submissions, deliberately creating more anchor text on a page etc. websites gained good ranking on SERPs till they again got caught by Google.

And, Google once again released another update called the Penguin update, that aimed to penalize those websites who were using black hat techniques to promote their website & rank well for the keywords. As the update focused on quality of backlinks, the effect varied from website to website. Google also mentioned about the doorway pages which were only built to attract search engine traffic that are against the SEO webmaster guidelines.

Many websites saw a decrease in their Pagerank post Penguin update which meant the website had backlinks which weren’t built on best SEO practices.

The Penguin update affected approximately 3.1% of search queries in English, about 3% of queries in languages like German, Chinese, and Arabic, and an even bigger percentage of them in "highly spammed" languages.

Google specifically mentioned 5 bullet points to keep in consideration while doing a link building campaign for any website after this update as:

1.     Keyword research for link building
2.     Quality of the linking page
3.     Landing page where you desire your visitors to land
4.     Use of correct Anchor text
5.     Prefer manual submissions over bot-submissions

Now, with the number of version updates of Panda & Penguin – Webmasters & website owners are compelled to adhere with SEO guidelines for their website optimization.

Remarkably, there has been a noticeable change in approach as well from SEO experts to rank their website while working within the limits of white hat techniques.

To consider & evaluate the importance of link & content for the website. It will not be a diplomatic statement to say that they both contribute to each other’s performance & at the sametime operates individually as a ranking parameter for the website.

We should have good quality content on our website describing our product/services in suited way to give a best user experience to our visitors where inbound links will help in increasing the referral traffic resulting in increase of visitors on website.

Like we say, A compulsive marketing plan can only be successful if we have best product/service to offer. Similarly, Link building is our marketing plan that creates awareness of our brand among online users & content gives great user experience to customers if we maintain its originality & relevance.