Content is king? - Cash is King When it Comes to Links

My analysis shows that all the top sites in my niche buy links

[surfgatinho]

After many years of building what is easily the most comprehensive site in my niche I am beginning to realise that great content alone is not enough.

I have the content, I have the visitors looking for that content but the related monetised content is so competitive that I don't see why anyone would link to yet another site selling bla bla.

I do OKish in the SERPS for some of the competitive terms but am getting pushed out by sites that just focus on the money stuff. Looking at their back-links they are all buying them.

So there we go. Is anyone going to try and dissuade me from doing the same or is that just the way it is?

[Marvin Hlavac]

Yes, but wouldn't that be easier to manipulate than links?

[wheel]

My theory is that someday soon one of the big 3 are going to figure out that actual behavior from real people is a way better more accurate way to gauge a site's importance for a keyword

You can't gauge direct human behavior. You can only gauge what you see their computer's doing.

First, that's what links already do - attempt to measure human behavior/motivation/action. there's nothing that suggests that some other measure of computer action (call it what you will) is going to be a better, less manipulable guage.

Secondly, whatever it is,can be manipulated. And I bet that pretty much anything that can be measured like that is easier to manipulate than links and harder to detect.

[londrum]

you can't really gauge the meaning behind a link either.
people might say something like "this place is better than this place", and link to both. or they might say "whatever you do, don't go here"

or maybe they have a football page, and list all the official team sites. but does that mean they think any of them are any good?

people might talk about a site for any number of different reasons without intending to give them a vote.

plus, you've got the problem of links from years ago. people can change their minds about stuff. i might have voted for the republicans four years ago, but that doesn't mean i want my vote remembered when the next election comes up. that old vote should be classed as totally irrelevant.

[Lorel]

I saw on a recent Matt Cutts video from Pub Con that Google is getting pretty good at discovering paid links and they just remove whatever benefit they might have. So no need for a big house cleaning now - just a little bit of dusting here and little bit there.

[martinibuster]

Google is getting pretty good at discovering paid links...

Google is getting better at finding yesterday's low hanging fruit, paid link schemes many people abandoned years ago. Google's automated paid link algo is imperfect and has been creating false positives throughout 2009, resulting in innocent sites losing their traffic.

[Makaveli2007]

My theory is that someday soon one of the big 3 are going to figure out that actual behavior from real people is a way better more accurate way to gauge a site's importance for a keyword. Bounce rate, time on site, return visits, ect. are a much better actual test of a site than simply counting links.

Not that I care a ton about defending Google & Co lol, but I find comments like this kind of surprising...Have you considered that Google has a bunch of brillant people working dilligently on trying to improve their search engine?

And then someone simply knows that they're completely wrong and will soon find out the ultimate truth..my money would be on Google's team over your guess :-).

Then again, if they employ too many mathematicians and statisticians it might take them a few years to find out how to tie their shoe strings hehe.

[Lorel]

My theory is that someday soon one of the big 3 are going to figure out that actual behavior from real people is a way better more accurate way to gauge a site's importance for a keyword.

Wasn't this in Google's recent patent(s)? :)