I often tell clients that they’ll only benefit from a pile of good, relevant links – not necessarily from any single backlink. Growing your rankings, traffic, and business isn’t quite as simple as getting that one unicorn link.
Some business owners don’t like to hear that. “Well, my competitor who’s outranking me only has 1 good link,” or, “Are you telling me we busted our hump to get a ‘great link’ that won’t clearly help us?”
It’s complicated. On the one hand, without at least some good links you won’t be competitive, and Google surely values some more than others (80/20 rule). On the other hand, you can’t say exactly how much Google values a specific link, or if and when it starts “paying off.” That’s why people who use a single strategy – like “scholarship link-building” – as their only way to earn good links are in for a disappointment, in my experience.
As I often do, I decided it was time for a little experiment.
My site has tons of authoritative links, but until recently it didn’t have one from a .edu domain. I think that’s because my audience consists mainly of business owners and other SEOs and marketers. Not as many professors.
In a roundabout way, I found that a school affiliated with my alma mater wanted donations for a robotics competition between the kids.
The Boston University Academy sure had an inviting “Sponsors” page on BU.edu, with a “follow” image link for each sponsor.
BU Academy isn’t the one shaking me down for money every month, and I thought their robotics competition sounded like a good cause, so I was glad to donate a few bucks – and in the name of SEO (pseudo)science, no less.
I reached out to the coordinator, mailed in my check, and a few days later got my logo/link down near the bottom of the page, where all the cool businesses hang out.
What happened then?
Did my traffic “EXPLODE!” or “SKYROCKET!!” (a la Warrior Forum infoproduct)?
Not that I noticed. Traffic stayed pretty much stayed the same after getting that nice .edu link.
Now, as with most experiments, there may have been some “noise” in this one. To wit:
1. Local Visibility System already had a heavy-duty link profile, and got even more good ones after the .edu. I suppose it’s possible there would have been a more-noticeable effect if I hadn’t had many or any good links before the .edu, or didn’t continue to get them afterwards.
2. Of course, there is other dust flying. For instance, the highest peaks in my traffic come when I do a blog post that I announce to the people on my email list. Of course, it often is the case that a business has other marketing activities going on.
3. I’m not a “local” business. Boston University is relevant to Boston, and I live near Boston, but most of my traffic comes from all over the place. Perhaps ironically, I don’t give a hoot about my local rankings. Maybe my local rankings benefited from the geographically-relevant .edu link, but the point is my numbers in Analytics don’t show a clear before-and-after.
4. There was no anchor text. I got an image link (i.e. my logo was hyperlinked).
5. The link went up only 3 months ago. Maybe it takes longer to notice a “pop,” but I’d have no way of attributing that to that one link, with everything else I’ve got swirling around.
I’m sure this isn’t the last word on “the potential payoff of one backlink,” of course. Other people may have data that contradicts mine. Maybe you have data that contradicts mine. I’d love to hear.
Still, I feel more confident in saying (1) there isn’t necessarily any magic in a .edu link, and that (2) a great backlinks profile is more than the sum of its parts.