My experiment to determine what Google favors more - Unique Content or Quality Backlinks

I like the challenge, but most warriors already knows this: Google cares $%#@ about unique content. They only care about satisfying the searchers and a good "user experience" for everyone. They could not care less if you stole the article from another website, that is not their problem, the only thing they need to do is satisfy the searcher's needs.

So back links will always have much more weight than any unique content, because Google sees back links as a finger showing "that is popular!". And as we all know, the more popular a site or article is, the better chance of satisfying the user (Google is all about statistics), and therefore the article will get good search engine rankings.

I also thought in the beginning, lets impress Google with unique content! Well, I tried it, wasted more than 100 hours (Martial Arts - Nova Martial Arts) , Google gave me 10 visitors a day for three months. Without back links you are doomed.

BUT remember, if your site does not have any nice content visitors won't stay, and Google knows this, so make sure your visitors stay after a search, otherwise the back links won't help in the long term, Google will quickly throw your site out of the SERPS if they notice you don't satisfy the searcher (just like they increase the bids in Adwords). But how you do that, Google doesn't really care, as long as you do it.

Hope this helps

Yup, I did a mini-experiment and stopped working on a site altogether (no new content, no new backlinks). I noticed the Google ranking gradually get lower and lower. Then I added more content, just one post a day, and it came back up.

But you're right, there's so many other parameters in play that it's hard to determine exactly what was going on.

Well Khtm,

From my experience to get indexed you as fast as possible you just need to post your page to social media websites like digg.com and so on with the dofollow link.

Do it to like 3 or 4 of them and you will get indexed quick sometimes in like 1 hour.

Also if you have a blog. I have noticed this.

Be a member of forums like warrior or dp and have a backlink to your main page and be an active poster.

Now any new stories will be on that page and will get indexed quick.

So that is what has worked for me.

Thanks,
Brian P

Use a program like Word Press Direct to automate the content creation and focus on backlinks

Yea backlinks is really the only way to rank high on pages. I mean content is content. If you have good backlinks with those keywords in your content then you will rank high. Its really a rat race in my mind.

I have had success with SEO and that is how I have had to get to the first page of certain celebrity names. If anyone knows an easier way I am all ears.

Thanks

I've setup both sites, am now just waiting for Google to index them. I tried to make them have similar content but rewritten to be unique, but I'm a bit worried that Google may completely ignore one of the two because their structure is exactly the same. Oh and not to mention that they share the same domain.

Guess time will tell!

A - Jump Higher Exercises
B - Jump Higher Exercises

The on-page ranking algorithm has very little to do with unique content, and more to do with site relevance, bounce rate, and a few other metrics no one can be too sure about.

Think about it for a moment - Google has to come up with mathematical algorithms to rank billions of sites automatically. They can't decide what content is "good" or bad", they can't specify a certain number of "words" that must be met, nor how "unique" content is, they have to instead go off algorithms, which greatly diminishes the value of unique and good quality content.

Backlinks are something that Google can easily incorporate into their algorithms. If you have a thousand relevant, high authority backlinks, with a crappy dupe content site, you can be certain it's going to outrank a site that has a thousand pages of the most state of the art, unique content ever written (this is barring people linking to that site of course, due to its good content, but we're talking strictly about algorithms here).

Now the long term effect may be slightly different. Whilst not proven, I strongly believe Google will look at the click-through rate, and the bounce rate of a site, in order to get an idea as to whether it's satisfying the user experience. If the bounce rate is too high, and the click through rate too low, then the site may have a negative metric applied to it. Even still, the "crappy" site will continue to outrank your "unique content site" since it will be nowhere to be seen. Google has not yet had the chance to determine whether the unique content site is any good or not, only that it contains a lot of pages of content. Furthermore, even with a high bounce rate, the poor quality site is going to continue to outrank the good quality site with a few high authority backlinks, even if the good content site has a low bounce rate. This is until the good content site has some authority backlinks as well.

So to answer your question, there's no doubt about it - backlinks are much, much more important than content, although content is ultimately what sells. So have the content you need to attract your subscribers, or to sell your products, but then focus your efforts primarily on obtaining backlinks.

One last thing I'll debunk is a site losing ranking if it hasn't been updated for a while, and hence the presumption that updating a site constantly is necessary to maintain rankings. Quite simply, this isn't the case, however there's many reasons for this, and I can't sum them up in this post. Least to say, this "illusion" is caused by two main things - first of all, if the update frequency of your site stops, the Googlebot will crawl your site less often, and a metric may be applied that causes you to temporarily lose rankings. The second thing is that static content may take a while to acquire trust and gain rankings, and this is why updated fresh content ranks quicker, since you have the Googlebot constantly crawling it, whereas you don't with static content. If you keep acquiring a natural progression of inlinks to your static content pages however, your rankings should start to rise again to where they were. Sometimes this can take many months.

One last note I'll add is that a manual review destroys everything I've said. It's a combination of good content to pass a manual review, along with a good link building strategy, that will lead to long term rankings.

^ Thanks for the very detailed and informative post, Steven. You seem to really know your stuff.

I had no idea that "manual reviews" even happened? So you're saying some dude in Google-land actually manually reviews indexed sites?

And I'm curious about bounce rate. Couldn't Google only know about this if we have Analytics or Webmaster Tools code in our HTML? So how is that fair that sites using Google's own services would be possibly penalized over sites that don't? This is something that I've been thinking about for a while. It almost makes me want to steer clear of using any Google tracking code.

Actually I found this in the Analytics FAQ

"Your website data will not be used to affect your natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement. Aggregate data across many customers will be used to improve our products and services."

So apparently my paranoia was unfounded Well, at least according to Google's public statement.

Not a problem khtm =)

And if only Google told us the truth about everything. When I say there's no evidence to back up bounce rates, there isn't, but from my experience they do incorporate this into their algorithms. I also believe they use a number of other controversial things (such as whois data).

And yes, if a site is automatically "flagged for review" by Google, they will manually review it, and could even deindex the site if it's spam. This is what puts the "spanner in the works" of the good old days of algorithm manipulation.

Why not just ad both? problem solved

Not sure what ya mean, I've been trying equally as hard to get both sites indexed, but Google is too smart. Two weeks later only one of the two sites is indexed.

i'm curious how this turns out and what the ratio turns out to be

@mikeong88

Both domains have the same three octets of the web server IP, but not entirely unique IPs. Do you think this would be enough of a difference?

^ Sorry, I thought you meant if I moved one of the sites to another domain that I own would both domains have the same IP. (Because they are with the same host).

Of course they're the same now as they are subdomains of the same domain

Ok I guess my next step will be to move one of the sites to another domain.

I've just seen interesting results with a new site. It has 15 pages so far and I gave it one link from a PR3 page of another site I have. I got 85 daily visitors after 2 weeks.

So the content is starting to rank well but the site has only 1 incoming link. Perhaps that gives you some ideas on how Google works.

Ok, I've moved Site B to another domain. I even renamed the Site A subdomain so it doesn't contain the letter "a" anymore.

Now let's see if Google finally indexes both of 'em

Site A - Jump Higher Exercises
Site B - Jump Higher Exercises