Google Inside

As I reported back in December 2006, Google’s crawlers weren’t being very crawly at all. Things have changed quite drastically from that point.

This is the same site that I discussed in my previous article on the crawl rates. Comparing the two charts, you can visibly see that the crawl rates in December of the site were down to only 600 pages per day being crawled.

Look at today, nearly 15,000 pages per day are being crawled now. So what did I do to actually change this so drastically? One word: backlinks.

The site that these graphs are taken from is not Ginside.com, but another site I own which I’m choosing not to disclose. The site has incrementally gained more and more natural backlinks simply by having great content and a great interface. The site has had multiple overhauls for the design and functionality, but it’s come to a point where people naturally link to it without even having to ask.

I believe that has been the real key to it. Backlinks, backlinks, and more backlinks. The more Google sees other sites voting for yours, it trusts you more — this is innately origin of SEO.

But in response to my earlier question, “Is it possible that too many backlinks is back bad for your site?” my answer is this.

I don’t feel there are ever too many backlinks, but do learn this: quality over quantity.

There have been studies among studies done about backlinks and the result comes down to who actually links to you, not how many. Having a thousand PR1 backlinks will not compare to having a single PR5 or PR6 backlink. It’s a simple math equation for how PageRank works and how PageRank is actually implemented into the search results you see everyday.