What Is Your Backlinks-to-Pages Ratio? Could this be a quick, powerful metric??

[Sally Stitts]

As reported by Google Webmaster Tools, what is your backlinks to pages ratio?

For one of my sites, my backlinks-to-pages ratio is 123.
In other words, there are an average of 123 incoming links for each page on the site.

I am thinking that "farm sites" probably have a fairly poor backlinks-to-pages ratio. If so, this metric could be a very quick indicator of "farm content", regardless of farm size.

What do you think? Am I just blowing smoke?
Can we toss out a few numbers?
Maybe something like -
10 is poor, 100 is good, 500 is excellent?
Care to speculate?
.

[tedster]

Without a measure of the strength for each backlinking page, I don't know how good this metric would be. Assuming a wide range of linking page types and strengths, I can see looking at it.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

All data is only as useful as the positive action you derive from it. Keeping that in mind it doesn't matter how many pages or incoming links you have because two constants remain the same. A) More pages = more possible entry points to your site and B) More links = more possible entry points to your site. You want both.

As far as rankings are concerned it's not a flat or 2D scenario. You want quality but quantity is also measured and both are measured over time. You want relevant but all links are measured over time. You want social mention but all mention is recorded and re-evaluated over time.

It's a complicated can of worms to even begin to place a finite value on backlinks to pages ratio.

Bottom line - there is no perfect recipe, there is only a recipe slightly better than your competition. That's what you're after. If a pure numbers answer is what you want to hear I own sites with few backlinks that dominate their niche and I'd like to believe that's because of quality and solid SEO(internal link structure etc). Again, in that niche few backlinks are ever given, to anyone, so it boils down to you vs competition, that comparative metric is one Google has down cold.

edit: Kudos on trying to find out what your competition does :-)

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 8:12 pm (utc) on Mar 6, 2011]

[Jane_Doe]

I agree with Tedster. I think one in content link from the New York Times is worth a lot more than hundreds of even thousands of junk scraper or small blog links. I think links are still very important, but more so the quality than the quantity.

[Sally Stitts]

I should have said that I was assuming somewhat of a normal curve, worthless links at the bottom, and high grade links at the top.

Yeah, I know, each curve would be different, based upon the site. Some sites have many good links overall, and some sites have many poor links overall.

I was looking for a "quick and dirty" measurement. From comments, it looks like not even this is viable.
So, I guess it's back to the "nothing can be measured" philosophy, because of all the exceptions. I guess we would need a quality links divided by lousy links metric, which is logistically impractical to create.
Sorry, I tried.
.

[deadsea]

The number in webmaster tools includes internal links. The more pages that you have, the more internal links you have, the higher that number would be. Number of external links per page would be a more useful number, but its harder to come by.

Your hypothesis also doesn't jive with my experience. If you launch more pages than you have inbound links to support, Google just stops crawling and indexing additional pages. You don't get a penalty either before or after the content farm algorithm change.

[Content_ed]

Backlinks are better than 100:1 and we actually were linked by the New York Times, and in the perfect context. Didn't help a bit in the latest update. I think the whole point of the change is that they are looking at factors other than the quantity and quality of backlinks

[goodroi]

I would not spend too much time on this ratio. Let me give you an example there is a site with 10:1 ratio and it outperforms another site that has 3500:1 ratio. That is because the 10 links come from powerful research projects hosted on university .edu pages and the 3500 links come from blogspam.

[HuskyPup]

Care to speculate?

I have several successful niche sites with almost zero backlinks and I certainly do not have any site with even 1:1 let alone 123:1 backlinks.

Then again, I have never bothered about backlinks just like Page Rank!

[Jane_Doe]

I think the whole point of the change is that they are looking at factors other than the quantity and quality of backlinks

I think they are looking at other factors in addition to back links, and sometimes those other factors trump even solid back links.

[tedster]

Could we say it this way - that backlinks are still part of the full algorithm (that seems clear) but links are NOT part of the Panda document classifier that has just been added into the mix.