Would you rather invest in better content or stronger backlinks if your budget only allowed one?
- Thread starter jorge1243
- Start date
Content always. Buying backlinks is not appropriate. It will cause huge issues. The SEs know when they see purchased backlinks. They keep a record. You will be penalized for using them. The "backlink game" is over. Backlinks should come from your, or a team members, efforts of contacting those who have sites in your niche, and those associated with your niche, and building relationships with them by trading content that supports one another. Natural backlinking is what the algorithms looks for and they have become exceptionally good at it.
Content is king and traffic is Queen.
Make sure to build the content and link relationships with sites whose Domain Authority and SE Rankings are the same or better than your own. This is a MUST!
Content is king and traffic is Queen.
Make sure to build the content and link relationships with sites whose Domain Authority and SE Rankings are the same or better than your own. This is a MUST!
jorge1243
Member
i think you are talking about general backlinks strategy, but what if we use niche relevant backlink, would the blog be penalized after that ?
I spoke to that. Yes, the links must be niche relevant, but the issue is the SEs are gathering data daily on the links that providers (commercial providers) are selling or trading. When the SEs see the same link on multiple sites in short periods of time they flag them and then consequently flag the sites. Your sites are not the only place a purchased link will be installed. They are used over and over and can be found on far more sites than the SEs consider natural, or normal, linking.
Buying and selling links has gone the path of buying and selling followers, likes, etc. It simply results in a penalty sooner, sometimes later, but the penalties always come. There is always an accounting when it involves the SEs. These practices are just not worth the money and the detriment they can, and likely, will cause.
jorge1243
Member
That makes sense, especially about the repeated use of the same paid links. Do you think manually earned niche-relevant backlinks through outreach or genuine partnerships still carry strong SEO value or has Google evaluation changed significantly in recent years?
Absolutely! "The proof is in the pudding"! It has certainly been very beneficial to my content sites. It's among the stronger and consistent components for any content site.
Google has, for decades, evaluated and re-evaluated link strategies used by us in the content business. It goes back to their first few years as an SE. Back then most of us were building "link wheels", a form of link exchange but with our own sites. They lowered the hammer on that and then instructed their algos to identify those link wheels and punish us with lower rankings and some with de-indexing. The linking game has long been a target by marketers and traditional business sites and most of us did abuse it back in those days. It was effective!
Google has well thought out and very direct definitions and suggestions for staying in a state of grace with them when it comes to linking. They know and accept that linking is a powerful and necessary addition to legitimate sites and they want legitimate sites to do it in a fashion that brings strategic strength to those that incorporate their vision of utility with linking. However, they want everyone to know they hold the hammer ready for those that choose to abuse the strategy and it's implementations.
HERE IS GOOGLES ANSWER TO "Does Google like backlinks?"
Yes, Google loves backlinks. Backlinks are incoming links from other websites to your page. Google treats them like digital "votes of confidence". When trusted sites link to you, they tell Google your content is helpful.
Think of it like a popularity contest with a twist. It is not just about the number of votes you get. The quality of the voter matters most. One vote from a giant, respected site (like a major news outlet) is worth more than a hundred votes from tiny, unknown blogs.
Google looks for a few key things to decide if a backlink is good:
- Relevance: Does the other site match your topic? If a shoe store links to your bakery, Google gets confused.
- Authority: How well-respected is the other site? Government (.gov) or educational (.edu) sites carry a lot of weight.
- Trust: Is the site safe and well-established?
Last edited:
jorge1243
Member
Appreciate the detailed insight. It seems the fundamentals haven't really changed, earning relevant, trustworthy links still wins, while manipulative tactics just become easier for Google to detect over time. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Jorge, going back to your original question, head-on: if the budget only covers one, fund content first. Not because links don't matter, but because outreach without something worth linking to is just asking strangers for favors. One genuinely useful page (a comparison, a calculator, original data, anything with numbers in it) does double duty: it ranks on its own AND it gives every future outreach email a reason to exist. Then the first link dollars go toward promoting that asset, not toward random placements.
On the niche relevance question you asked earlier, I'd push it further than "safe": relevance is where most of the value lives. In our outreach campaigns, a DR 40 link from a site in the exact niche typically outperforms a DR 70 from a general site. Google reads the linking page's topic, the paragraph around the link, even who else that domain links out to. A link is a vote, but it's also context. Ten relevant votes beat fifty confused ones.
One thing nobody's mentioned yet: dofollow vs. nofollow. Dofollow links pass ranking equity, so those move positions. But a profile that's 100% dofollow is itself a footprint — natural profiles always pick up nofollow mentions from forums, socials, directories. Google's treated nofollow as a "hint" rather than a hard ignore since 2019, and relevant nofollow mentions still bring referral traffic and brand searches. Chase dofollow for rankings; don't sweat the nofollow that shows up alongside it. It makes the whole profile look human.
So on a limited budget: one strong content asset, then manual outreach to relevant sites at your level or above like TJ said, and treat every link as a relationship, not a transaction. Slower, but it compounds. The shortcuts get more expensive every year.
On the niche relevance question you asked earlier, I'd push it further than "safe": relevance is where most of the value lives. In our outreach campaigns, a DR 40 link from a site in the exact niche typically outperforms a DR 70 from a general site. Google reads the linking page's topic, the paragraph around the link, even who else that domain links out to. A link is a vote, but it's also context. Ten relevant votes beat fifty confused ones.
One thing nobody's mentioned yet: dofollow vs. nofollow. Dofollow links pass ranking equity, so those move positions. But a profile that's 100% dofollow is itself a footprint — natural profiles always pick up nofollow mentions from forums, socials, directories. Google's treated nofollow as a "hint" rather than a hard ignore since 2019, and relevant nofollow mentions still bring referral traffic and brand searches. Chase dofollow for rankings; don't sweat the nofollow that shows up alongside it. It makes the whole profile look human.
So on a limited budget: one strong content asset, then manual outreach to relevant sites at your level or above like TJ said, and treat every link as a relationship, not a transaction. Slower, but it compounds. The shortcuts get more expensive every year.
Similar threads
