How many links?

What should my target be?

[BananaDude]

I notice people talking about 1000's of links, and at the same time saying one should build them up manually. Then I see some pages on page 1 of results with seemingly no or very few links. How many links should I aim for before I can expect some PR?

My site has been live now for 5 months and still only a whitebar. I've probably got 50 or 60 related sites linking back to me (after requesting reciprocal links from at least 200 sites) and I've done all the onpage stuff. What am I doing wrong? Is it the number of links? Is it the sandbox?

Your thoughts would be helpful.

[cabowabo]

Welcome to Webmaster World! The senior people will tell you that there isn't a magic number of links to get, and you shouldn't focus on quantity, rather quality. Look at the top directories in your field that pass PR (check the code - for example, Yahoo! no longer passes PR). Submit press releases, write articles, etc. Do all the little things to promote and brand your business, and link popularity will occur as a natural result of your efforts.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[ken_b]

No magic number....PR.... etc.

The hardest part of this kind of question is that we don't really know what you are trying to achieve. That said....

The PR that shows on the toolbar is almost meaningless as far as I can tell. It updates infrequently, so if you just miss one update it could be months before you see the results from the next update. I wouldn't waste my time trying to work around the toolbar version of PR.

But are you really asking about PR, or about how many links it takes to rank well enough to get some traffic from Google.

If you want to rank for the highly competitive primary keyword like "widgets" you might need 1,000 or more links. On the other hand, if you want to rank for "antique widgets show in some city in June" you might be able to pull it off with a couple links from any page that's been crawled lately.

[cabowabo]

Also, the advice of "get one more link than your competition" is flawed as each link is not created equal.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[BananaDude]

Thanks for that. I also suspect after reading some posts elsewhere that the fact that dmoz has not listed me yet is probably why my site is a nobody to G.

[uhzoomzip]

That's sbdolutely false. My site is PR5 and ranks very well for a number of search terms but has never been listed in dmoz.

[mangotude]

I'd agree with the above - DMOZ is nice, but by no means essential, and certainly not worth wasting hours on that could be spent link building.

[sugarrae]

>>> I also suspect after reading some posts elsewhere that the fact that dmoz has not listed me yet is probably why my site is a nobody to G

You may want to stop reading there then as that is ludacris.

Check out your competition, see how many and what kind of links they having coming in. Check out their inbound anchors, look for range of sites - do some heavy competitive analysis on their linking patterns. After doing it to ten or so of them, you should be able to start to draw up a plan for a combination of backlinks you can gain for yourself that will move you up the chain in the serps.