Bigger Isn´t Always Better in the SEO Business

What would you rather have – a large, well known site linking to you from one of their lower-level pages or a smaller site linking to you from their homepage? It may come as a surprise to a few people that you stand to earn more strength and ranking from the smaller sites than you will from the big sites. It’s one of the paradoxes of SEO where bigger isn’t always better.

While there is no denying that being on the front page of a large site, such as MSN, Slashdot, etc., can bring you a lot of traffic – the chances of that happening often and for an extended period of time are rare. The bigger the site, the quicker the stories rotate in and out. However, for smaller sites many people find that the links stay around longer and in the long run they can have a far greater impact on the type of visitor as well as the strength of the link when it comes to rankings.

Think about it like this: When an advertiser purchases time for a commercial they often try to locate a show that not only attracts the type of person they are looking to market to, but also will give them the most exposure for their buck. Sure, they could blow their entire advertising budget on the Super Bowl and have one 30-second commercial that blankets everybody, or they could buy time on a lesser known shown that targets their demographic for far less. Which makes more sense?

It’s the same way in the SEO business as well. Though we can’t control who links to us, often time we waste a lot of time trying to get the big guys to link to us when our efforts could be better spent building relationships with the smaller sites. We are spending our SEO energy in the wrong place.

Let’s say we have a website devoted to vegetable gardening. Links to us from smaller sites that are in the same niche as us can have far stronger link juice than a link from a page buried deep down inside a large site. The added benefit is that being on the front page of that smaller site we are more apt to be recognized by the search engines much faster as front pages get indexed far more often than pages buried deep within a site.

Of course, nobody would ever say no to a link from a large site, but you should consider that a “bonus” instead of your main objective. You will be far better off in the long run devoting your time and skills to building those relationships with the little guys than you will be trying to convince the big guys to link to you from within.