In this article, we’ll answer the question, “how many backlinks should a website have?”
And more specifically, how many backlinks you need to rank for each page to rank in Google's search engine.
By the end of this post, you’ll know all about the right quantity of links your website needs and how to achieve better ranking results with fewer backlinks than you may have expected.
And if you like this type of post, make sure to check out the blog section ofSEO Chatterwhere I post more content like it.
How Many Backlinks Should a Website Have?
A website should have 40 to 50 backlinks to the homepage and 0 to 100 backlinks to each individual web page to be competitive for SEO. However, the PageRank scores of those backlinks are important because the higher their value, the fewer links are needed to boost overall rankings.
Your goal for long-term keyword competitiveness and higher rankings should be to acquire the highest PageRank backlinks you can get. Quality is always better than quantity when it comes to building backlinks.
Therefore, it's better to get a single high PR9 backlink than it is to get ten PR1 backlinks.
Factors That Affect the Number of Backlinks Your Website Needs
Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is an SEO metric first developed by Moz that measures the overall strength of a domain. Domain Rating(DR) is Ahrefs version of DA that shows the power of a website’s backlink profile. And Authority Score (AS) is Semrush’s adaption of DA for measuring the overall quality and SEO performance for a website.
DA, DR, and AS are all rated on a 100-point scale, with the higher numbers indicating a stronger domain with the probability of achieving better results in the SERPs.
With all things being equal in regards to content quality, matching user search intent,on-page SEO, andtechnical SEO, a website with a higher domain authority should rank higher in Google for a target keyword. But that's not always the case as you'll discover in the next section on Keyword Difficulty.
The reason that would typically happen is because Google’s algorithm takes into accountoff-page SEOfactors like backlinks to determine where a website should rank in the index. A website with more high quality sites linking to it will increase the target site's domain authority. Which makes it seem more valuable to Internet users, and therefore, the ranking algorithm.
Keyword Difficulty
Keyword difficulty is another metric that SEO tools use to estimate how difficult it could be to rank a web page for a target keyword. And like domain authority, it’s based on a 100-point scale, with the higher numbers indicating tougher competition.
There are four factors that influence keyword difficulty score, including:
As you can see, domain authority is just one element for estimating how tough it may be for you to rank a web page in the SERPs for a keyword phrase. Metrics like citation flow and trust flow are also important because it’s not just the quantity of backlinks that are important, but the quality of those incoming links as well.
A website with a lower DA score can outrank a site with a higher DA score because it has better quality backlinks to the individual web page. Also, there’s one other thing these SEO metrics do not take into consideration when judging a URL: the quality of the on-page SEO.
For some keywords, on-page SEO can outweigh the number of backlinks a web page has because it gives Google’s algorithm the correct signals it needs to rank the content for a set of keywords. Off-page SEO like backlinks are not always the most powerful SEO ranking factor, especially when on-page SEO is optimized well on the page.
Internal Linking
Another factor that impacts how many backlinks each page should have is the number of internal links a page receives.
There have been manySEO case studiesthat have proven the effect of internal links increasing the rankings for a web page in the SERPs. And some SEO testing indicates that 3 internal links are equal to 1 external backlink on average.
Google even reports that the more internal links a page has, the more important you’re telling the search engine crawler it is for the user. And therefore, the page should be given higher visibility in the SERPs.
Therefore, you should link internally to the pages you want to rank high in ther SEPRs using keyword-rich anchor text. Also, you want to link from other relevant content on the site and not just randomly because the annotation text surrounding the internal link can also be considered by Google’s indexing algorithm.
Achieving More for Your Website With Fewer Backlinks
The truth is trying to acquire more backlinks to your website and individual web pages is difficult. And Google actively discourages this practice because it only wants natural and organic backlinks to occur on the Internet.
And as you learned above, you don't always need a ton of backlinks to rank a page in the top 10 positions on Google. To help you achieve better ranking results with fewer backlinks, here are some best practices for SEO you can follow:
Once you’ve done everything you can to maximize the strength of the SEO factors you can control on your site, then, and only then, should you look to get more backlinks to an individual web page.
You may find that you need fewer backlinks than you imagined to rank for your keywords after you’ve optimized the web page and internal SEO signals correctly.
Discover More About Building Backlinks for Your Website
This article was originally published on the SEO Chatter website; however, this version on LinkedIn only includes the highlights from that guide.
You can read the full article here:https://seochatter.com/how-many-backlinks-do-i-need-to-rank/
