Backlinks - Quanitity or Quality?

I find it pretty easy to get a ton of backlinks to my web site pages. There are so many sites designed for reciprocal linking but do these sites really work well for getting targeted traffic?

Are reciprocal link sites helping you to make money online?

Using link:www.yourdomain.com from the Google search box will give you a list of the backlinks Google considers relevant to your site content.

Now do the same thing in the Yahoo search box. How many links do you see that you have in Yahoo?

And don’t forget MSN, give it a try using the same command and see how many backlinks you have listed there.

I have a couple of sites that have almost a thousand backlinks in Yahoo and almost two hundred in MSN but Google’s algorithms feels that less than 30 are relevant to my site.

Most of my links to these sites are reciprocal links and Google doesn’t really like the ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ type linking.

If your goal is to make money online, as mine is, you have to have targeted traffic. The generic traffic that arrives and leaves just that fast isn’t going to put food on your table is it. I learned that lesson the hard, as I learn most things.

It really comes down to quality of links and not just quantity. Plus one-way-links are much better for your site, in Googles eyes.

For me backlinking comes down to finding sites that have:

1. High PageRank (PR)

2. Similar Niche, complimenting your content but not necessarily competing with it

3. I prefer DOFOLLOW links

4. I am at my internal pages, deep linking

5. I will take a one-way-link over reciprocal any day of the week

6. I vary my anchor text with keywords applicable to my site of course

I used to take any linking I could get and worked hard at it. Now I put thought into my linking instead of just hours of unrewared labor.