Backlinks - How Many Are Enough?

 

Many times I've heard it asked in webmaster forums: "How many backlinks do I need?". Worse yet, many more webmasters never ask that question. Instead, they ask why they are not listed well with Google. Investigating their site we find a severe lack of backlinks in almost every case. There are also those of us interested in raising our PageRank with Google for various reasons, (usually egoistic in nature), but what does it take to raise my PageRank one notch upward?

Getting To The Top

For the first question, the number of backlinks needed to have your site listed in search engine results depends greatly on the competition for your keywords. Do a search for your most wanted keyword and notice how many results are returned. The higher that number, the more competitive your keyword is and the more backlinks you'll need. If the number of results returned is more than one million, you're in for a tough battle to the top. You'll need thousands of backlinks from trusted sites. On the other hand, if the number of results are less than 100,000, your journey to the top ten search results will be much easier; 1,000 backlinks from decent sites should do the trick. Lastly, if the number of results is less than 10,000, you should be able to place in the top ten with just several hundred good backlinks.

Increasing Your PageRank

The second question, how to increase a site's PageRank, is an even trickier question to answer. Explaining the original PageRank algorithm, PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)), is beyond the scope of this article, however, we can make some educated assumptions without being math Phd's. The first and most important assumption regarding Google's PageRank algorithm is that it is based on a logarithmic scale of 5.5. Remember, this is not fact, but just an educated assumption among those who have studied the algorithm. The logarithmic scale of 5.5 means that a Google Toolbar PageRank, (TBPR), of 2 is roughly 5.5 times as important and as valuable as a 1. This same "importance" factor can be applied to any TBPR.

For example, a TBPR7 is equal to 5.5 TBPR6's.

Therefore, if your homepage has a TBPR5 and you are striving to increase it to a TBPR6, you'll need 5.5 times as many backlinks as you already have assuming that your new backlinks are of the same quality as your current backlinks. That's a huge leap! Alternatively, you can try to get backlinks from sites that have a high TBPR, such as TBPR5. If so, five to ten TBPR5's should bump your site up to a six. That's over simplified, to be sure, because the numbers showing on the Toolbar are approximations.