links as seo ranking factor: still very powerful!

A Study by Eric Enge

Complete Study atstonet.co/link-study

You’ve seen the claims...

“So many new ranking factors,and they’re all important!”

“Content quality is all that matters!”

“RankBrain has taken overall Google algorithms!”

Um...no.

In fact, links remain a veryimportant ranking factor.

Let’s dig into the data...

Google’s Andrey Lipattsevyoutu.be/l8VnZCcl9J4

Content and links going into your site are the two most important ranking factors.

Link correlations in Moz & SearchMetrics studies bit.ly/moz-ranking & bit.ly/searchmetrics-rankfactors

Problem:Those are significant correlations but,

about the same as other highly-correlated factors in those studies.

So why would Google say links are stillso high up in their ranking factors?

Two Key Factors:Both studies evaluated each SERP individually,

then took the mean of all results.

Both studies also focused solely oncommercial terms.

We took a different approach that statistics expertstold us was more valid (details at stonet.co/link-study)

We also tested more varied query types,including:

Commercial head termsCommercial long tail terms

Informational terms

(In fact, 2/3 of our queries were informational)

We found a correlation of total links to a site as higher than correlations of Moz DA or PA.

And, in fact, the correlation of total linksto as site was much higher by our methodology

than in the other two studies

We also normalized the links across SERP positions in aggregation to counteract false

negative correlations.

This “smoothing” process yields even higher correlations for total links to a site.

And when we took the aggregate correlations across blocks of 10 search results, the

Spearman Correlation jumped to perfect!

I believe that these aggregated calculationsshow a far truer picture of the true power of links than the mean-based methods of the

other studies.

By the way, a manual analysis of several hundred results revealed that the following

types of results are likely NOT as influenced by links:

• Local results (not maps results, but results that are locally influenced)

• Query deserves diversity• In Depth Articles

These accounted for about 6% of the results.

But all this does not mean your contentquality is irrelevant. Far from it!

If your content is not relevant or competitive, links won't help ranking.

If it is, links will make the difference.

Our own experience working with many Fortune 500 clients bears out the value of

good backlinks to quality, relevant content.

IMPORTANT:

We don’t find that links can rescue poor quality content, or cause low relevance

content to rank.

Also, all of our efforts focus on getting recognition from, or content published on,

very high authority sites.

Complete Study atstonet.co/link-study