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How many one-way backlinks does it take to reach the top position in Google?

By karin, on May 12th, 2010

I have had several conversations lately about one-way backlinks. One of the questions that I have been asked is “how many one-way backlinks do I need to reach the top position in Google?”

A very good question that does not have a short answer. Think about it. There are sites that have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of links. Do they dominate the search engines everywhere? The answer is no. They don’t. You don’t see the same few sites at the top of the search engines all the time. That would not be a good thing. We would never be able to find good quality content only because they do not have as many backlinks. Clearly, we can still beat them. Why is that. How is it possible for us to still compete with sites that have so many backlinks?

The answer lies in the keyword phrase used. Even though the total number of backlinks is important, it is more important to see how many backlinks have the keyword phrase in the anchor text. If a site has, say, 10,000 backlinks, but only 5 have the keyword phrase ‘weight loss supplement’ in it, you can still beat that site in search engine rankings by creating more than 5 targeted backlinks to your web page.

Now that we know that the anchor text is important, you are probably wondering how you can find out how many links a site has with your keyword phrase in it. To answer that question I will show you how I do my competitor research.

Let’s use the keyword phrase “weight loss supplement” as an example. First you check how many sites are indexed in Google by searching for “weight loss”. By using quotes you only see the results for those pages that have the exact keyword phrase, rather than the keyword ‘weight’ on one part of the page and ‘loss’ maybe somewhere else on the page.


This search revealed 588,000 sites indexed in Google for this exact term. Next you want to know how many of the sites with the exact keyword phrase have backlinks with the exact keyword phrase. You do this by typing allinanchor:”weight loss supplement” in the Google search box.


The results you see now are all from pages with ‘weight loss supplement’ in the anchor text of (some of) their backlinks. The total number of websites has gone down to 441,000. These all have backlink(s) with ‘weight loss supplement’ in the anchor text.

This is very relevant information, because this is your true competition to reach the #1 spot. But it is still not enough. We still don’t know how many links with this keyword phrase these webpages have. That is why we have to add one more step to finally answer the question. We will use the site backlinkwatch.com to achieve our goal. You type in the URL of the #1 page for the search that we just did. In our case that is “weightlosssupplement.org”. Backlink Watch will give you the backlinks of the first thousand links with the anchor text and the number of outbound links. This is what the result looks like:


As you can see not all links are the same. In this case the majority of the links do have ‘weight loss supplement’ in the anchor text. On top of that the domain name is the keyword phrase. It is no wonder that this site has reached the top spot in Google for this particular keyword. You will need hundreds of one-way backlinks with the exact keyword phrase ‘weight loss supplement’ in the anchor text. This turns out to be an extremely competitive keyword.

I did a quick check for you to see how well this website did for another keyword phrase that came up in the BacklinkWatch report, namely ‘weight loss pill’. First of all this keyword is only partially in the domain name. Furthermore, the BacklinkWatch report showed that this keyword phrase is only used a few times as anchor text. It turns out that at the time of the writing of this article this website has a Google Page Rank of 42 for “weight loss pill”. A big difference, and we now understand why!

Back links
  • Anonymous

    Hi Karin!

    As always, your posts are fabulous! little by little, I am getting it. Even though I don’t understand very well, I get that this is majorly important stuff! I am anxious to learn, so I look forward to more articles!

    Fondly,

    Mentor Mama

    • social bookmarking

      Hi Nancy, thanks for all your kind words today. It is much appreciated. And don’t worry, I will keep writing more.

  • nancyburkebarr

    Hi Karin!As always, your posts are fabulous! little by little, I am getting it. Even though I don't understand very well, I get that this is majorly important stuff! I am anxious to learn, so I look forward to more articles!Fondly,Mentor Mama

  • social bookmarking

    Hi Nancy, thanks for all your kind words today. It is much appreciated. And don't worry, I will keep writing more.

  • http://socialnetworkvoter.com Linda B

    Backlink Watch is a fantastic tool…I like the info it returns far better than what Yahoo Site Explorer (the tool I was previously using for this purpose) gives, but it looks like all the extra traffic sent from your site has broken it! I just tried to run a search and got the error: “Out of Yahoo quota for today. Total 50,000 queries executed already.” Luckily I got a couple of useful searches run before this happened. Is there anyone not getting this message?

    Thanks for sharing your process with us; you are really a go-giver!

    • http://socialnetworkvoter.com social bookmarking

      I know Linda, it is a shame, but you can only do 5 searches per day. Make sure to save them as an excel spreadsheet so you don’t waste anything on reruns (I learned from that mistake).

      Let me know how this info is helping you! I love success stories.

    • social bookmarking

      I know Linda, it is a shame, but you can only do 5 searches per day. Make sure to save them as an excel spreadsheet so you don’t waste anything on reruns (I learned from that mistake).

      Let me know how this info is helping you! I love success stories.

  • http://timedtweeter.com Linda B

    Backlink Watch is a fantastic tool…I like the info it returns far better than what Yahoo Site Explorer (the tool I was previously using for this purpose) gives, but it looks like all the extra traffic sent from your site has broken it! I just tried to run a search and got the error: “Out of Yahoo quota for today. Total 50,000 queries executed already.” Luckily I got a couple of useful searches run before this happened. Is there anyone not getting this message?Thanks for sharing your process with us; you are really a go-giver!

  • http://socialnetworkvoter.com Anonymous

    I appreciate you sharing some of the finer points of backlinks. I had an intuitive feeling this was the case and I have approached much of what I do based upon this…not that I do it well yet but it has been in the back of my mind…so it is good to have some encouragement in this area to further become better versed here. Thanks for sharing…and I appreciate know about backlink watch as well.

    • social bookmarking

      Hey Bruce Great to hear that you are actively using the backlink info. Powerful info to have. If you use this information you will beat 90% of your competition, simply because they have no clue!

    • social bookmarking

      Hey Bruce Great to hear that you are actively using the backlink info. Powerful info to have. If you use this information you will beat 90% of your competition, simply because they have no clue!

  • brucebackman

    I appreciate you sharing some of the finer points of backlinks. I had an intuitive feeling this was the case and I have approached much of what I do based upon this…not that I do it well yet but it has been in the back of my mind…so it is good to have some encouragement in this area to further become better versed here. Thanks for sharing…and I appreciate know about backlink watch as well.

  • Anonymous

    Hi Karin,

    I am always so blown away by two things: your knowledge level and how you share it with challenged people like me! :) Thanks so much for helping us all out. You rock!

    • social bookmarking

      Thanks Debbie for your kind words. They are much appreciated.

    • http://bookmarksandvotes.com social bookmarking

      Thanks Debbie for your kind words. They are much appreciated.

  • debbiestevens

    Hi Karin,I am always so blown away by two things: your knowledge level and how you share it with challenged people like me! :) Thanks so much for helping us all out. You rock!

  • bagsnshoes2

    Karin, this is great stuff. I went through your example using keywords relevant to my site and was amazed to find that a small company holds the #1 position and that the majority of the backlinks do not have the keywords in their anchor text. The words I used had this company even beating out shoe giant Zappos! I appreciate you for showing me how to check out what the competition is doing!

  • bagsnshoes2

    Karin, this is great stuff. I went through your example using keywords relevant to my site and was amazed to find that a small company holds the #1 position and that the majority of the backlinks do not have the keywords in their anchor text. The words I used had this company even beating out shoe giant Zappos! I appreciate you for showing me how to check out what the competition is doing!

    • social bookmarking

      That is what happens when you take action. Way to go! I have had many similar experiences. Now you know much better what it takes to beat your competition!

  • bagsnshoes2

    Karin, this is great stuff. I went through your example using keywords relevant to my site and was amazed to find that a small company holds the #1 position and that the majority of the backlinks do not have the keywords in their anchor text. The words I used had this company even beating out shoe giant Zappos! I appreciate you for showing me how to check out what the competition is doing!

  • social bookmarking

    Thanks Debbie for your kind words. They are much appreciated.

  • social bookmarking

    Hey Bruce Great to hear that you are actively using the backlink info. Powerful info to have. If you use this information you will beat 90% of your competition, simply because they have no clue!

  • http://bookmarksandvotes.com social bookmarking

    I know Linda, it is a shame, but you can only do 5 searches per day. Make sure to save them as an excel spreadsheet so you don't waste anything on reruns (I learned from that mistake). Let me know how this info is helping you! I love success stories.

  • Garfield

    Hi Karin,

    That’s some handy info, I had no idea how to do that, now I have a new skill, cheers! I’m new to blogging ‘n such so I am basically a sponge right now. =D

    • social bookmarking

      Glad you liked it. Let me know if there are any particular questions I can answer for you.

  • Garfield

    Hi Karin,

    That’s some handy info, I had no idea how to do that, now I have a new skill, cheers! I’m new to blogging ‘n such so I am basically a sponge right now. =D

  • http://bookmarksandvotes.com Garfield

    Hi Karin, That's some handy info, I had no idea how to do that, now I have a new skill, cheers! I'm new to blogging 'n such so I am basically a sponge right now. =D

  • Tim Somers

    Karin, this post blew me away – very eye opening. Thank you for putting a ton of effort into this post.

    • http://controlemotionsafterabreakup.com social bookmarking

      Hey Tim, thanks for stopping by. I will add some more info on backlinks this week.

  • http://bookmarksandvotes.com Tim Somers

    Karin, this post blew me away – very eye opening. Thank you for putting a ton of effort into this post.

  • http://socialnetworkvoter.com Tim Somers

    Karin, this post blew me away – very eye opening. Thank you for putting a ton of effort into this post.

  • social bookmarking

    Glad you liked it. Let me know if there are any particular questions I can answer for you.

  • http://controlemotionsafterabreakup.com social bookmarking

    Hey Tim, thanks for stopping by. I will add some more info on backlinks this week.

  • social bookmarking

    That is what happens when you take action. Way to go! I have had many similar experiences. Now you know much better what it takes to beat your competition!

  • Edward

    This is an amazing approach to looking into the true competition that exists for our business based on key words.
    Thanks for sharing this with us. I am going to try it out on my site and business and see what it tells me.

    Make it a great day!
    God Bless,
    -ed

  • Edward

    This is an amazing approach to looking into the true competition that exists for our business based on key words.Thanks for sharing this with us. I am going to try it out on my site and business and see what it tells me.Make it a great day!God Bless,-ed

  • Patty Cisco

    Karin great information on how to search for key words, and providing a better understanding of how they work!! Keep up the great “practical” tips.

  • Patty Cisco

    Karin great information on how to search for key words, and providing a better understanding of how they work!! Keep up the great “practical” tips.

  • Patty Cisco

    Karin great information on how to search for key words, and providing a better understanding of how they work!! Keep up the great “practical” tips.

  • Santana

    There also is http://www.backlinklab.com
    One can use it, when backlinkwatch is not available

  • Santana

    There also is http://www.backlinklab.com
    One can use it, when backlinkwatch is not available

  • Santana

    There also is http://www.backlinklab.comOne can use it, when backlinkwatch is not available

  • http://timedtweeter.com Tim Somers

    Karin, great post – can you tell me what you are using to see the Backlink URL and Anchor Text as shown above? thx,

  • Tim Somers

    Karin, great post – can you tell me what you are using to see the Backlink URL and Anchor Text as shown above? thx,

  • Tim Somers

    Karin, great post – can you tell me what you are using to see the Backlink URL and Anchor Text as shown above? thx,

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the helpful information! Trying it now!

  • marckdon

    Thanks for the helpful information! Trying it now!

  • http://controlemotionsafterabreakup.com Pit: Miami Web Design

    This is really a good post, I am in the process of optimizing my website and doing my SEO and this comes very handy.

  • Pit: Miami Web Design

    This is really a good post, I am in the process of optimizing my website and doing my SEO and this comes very handy.

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  • andromida

    I like your quality post.Anchor text always helps, but it is also important to have the home page have a good PR and the PR of the links the are powering your sites.I think the love for anchor text tricks will soon be less as google is more keen to keep their search engine free from tempering. Thanks

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  • http://controlemotionsafterabreakup.com buy backlinks

    Great tips Karin. I’d also like to add: it’s also a good idea to “mix and match” your anchor text with LSI variations of your keyword, not many, just a few on some high PR relevant pages is enough. 

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  • Bang Nguyen

    You don’t know how valuable your post is to me. I have been struggling for weeks. Trying to get backlinks but didn’t have any clues how to get to the top, didn’t know how many links are sufficient

    • social bookmarking

      I am glad you liked it. Feel free to ask questions if your struggles continue.

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