The Value of Links Back To Your Site (A Case Study)

There have been trillions of words written about how valuable it is for search engine optimization to get links back to your site from relevant sites with targeted keywords in the text of those links. So why even bother adding more noise to the conversation? Because I saw something happen the other day that underscores exactly why this is so important.

Yardbarker is like Digg.com for sports fans. They host a number of pro athlete blogs including Greg Oden’s blog. Greg was the #1 NBA draft pick this year. Naturally they rank #1 in Google for the term “Greg Oden blog”. The result in Google looks like this:

Recently the site had a technical hiccup at the same time Google was crawling and indexing its pages. Shortly after the crawl occurred the same search in Google showed this as the top result:

Now why would Google, with its ability to index pages lighting fast and move them up and down in rank at the drop of a hat display this bad result? The only conclusion I can draw is that there are so many relevant sites linking back to this page with the words “Greg Oden Blog” in the anchor text of the links that Google has no choice but to make this crappy page #1.

QED.

Full disclosure: Yardbarker is a client