Is That Really SEO?

Are some websites misleading or are they uninformed when it comes to SEO. I receive spam email all the time telling me that they can raise my SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings to position #1 by giving me ‘x’ number of backlinks for ‘x’ number of dollars. Other times I read blog posts or news releases claiming the “Top 5 Rankings”, when in actuality it’s only a list of websites and the number of backlinks they have.

Backlinks are to SEO like flower pedals are to a flower, it’s only a part of it but by no means is it the whole thing. Pedals are nice to look at but without the stigma, anther, filament, ovary, and other parts you don’t have a flower. A high backlink number may look nice, but without factoring in the PageRank of the backlinks, Rich Content, Keyword Placement, Search Engine Friendly URLs, Page Titles, and many other things, you don’t have true SEO.

TED Magazine, an Electrical Distributor Magazine, just released its July 2009 SEO Rankings of NAED, National Association of Electrical Distributors, distributor and manufacturer member websites. What they are judging here is the number of backlinks going to a single page of a website. This is not “SEO Rankings” but they clearly gave it two different SEO titles: “July 2009 SEO Rankings” and “TED TechRoom SEO Popularity Report”.

In case you didn’t know, according to Wikipedia:

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important).

Graybar ranked #5 on this list of 373, with 28,471 total backlinks! That’s an amazing number, but the number that is more important to me is the Google PageRank number, which Graybar is 5 out of 10, according to CheckPageRank Net! Where #1 on the backlinks list, American Light, only had a Google PageRank of 4.

What does that mean?

Google describes PageRank as:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

OK? Thanks. So what does that mean? What it means is, backlinks to your site are not all equal. If a website has 10 backlinks from low ranking sites it might not be as good as another website with 2 backlinks from 2 high ranking sites.

The table below shows the same “Top 5″ list but ranking them by Google’s PageRank.

Rank	Company	PageRank
1	Graybar	5
1	Ferguson/J. D. Daddario Company	5
1	HD Supply Company	5
4	American Light	4
4	Elliott Electric Supply	4

So what do these numbers tell us? American Light, which has 110,208 backlinks, doesn’t have the quality of backlinks as Graybar with 28,471 backlinks. So even though American Light has 81,737 more links than Graybar, Graybar still has a higher PageRank. To me this shows the real power of PageRank.

What about Rich Content, Keyword Placement, Page Titles and all of the other important factors in true SEO.  It would be nearly imposible for me to research all of that information.  The true test would be where does the website land on the SERP for the keywords they chose.  A website could have one million backlinks but if it doesn’t rank in the top 10 for keywords that people are searching for it does them no good. I guess SEO is something that is between the webmaster and Google, not something someone can make a chart out of.

In the world of SEO backlinks are important but they are not the only number to watch. True SEO is measured by where a website lands on the Search Engine Result Page. If you saw these numbers and didn’t know what they meant, thought the backlink numbers were the “SEO” numbers, or you just want to know more about SEO, please read this article.

Popularity: 2% [?]