Niche Site Project → FAQs → How Many Backlinks Do You Need to Rank?

How Many Backlinks Do You

Need to Rank?
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more info.

Doug Cunnington, PMP

It’s a common question. If

we knew how many links Just how many links does it take to rank…
we needed to get a site to
rank it would make life so much easier!

We would just have a formula for how many links we need to rank a certain
keyword for a certain page… So simple, right!?

Like all good questions, the answer is:

It Depends

Every keyword and niche is different so there is no way a person can

answer this question without deeper analysis.

The best way to get an idea is to analyze the competition. You can see how
many internal and external links a URL has to get a rough estimate. But
there are other factors in play which contribute to a page ranking in Google
for a term.

So you can do some research to make an assumption about how many links
are needed, but at best it’s just an educated guess.

Here are some of the main factors to research about the competition:

1. Number of External links

2. Authority of the external links

3. Number of Internal links

4. Authority of the internal links

5. Length of the content

6. Quality of the content

7. Age of the URL

8. Age of the internal & external links

For points 2 and 4, you can note the ranges of the authority so you can see
how many links of a certain authority level you might need. You can use the
metrics from Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, etc… — Remember that all of the
metrics are estimates so don’t treat them as gospel.

All this data can get you closer to an estimate of the number of links, but it’s
just an educated guess. As you move forward building or obtaining links,
you’ll have a better idea of what’s needed. You may find that the age of the
links is a bigger factor than the number of links, or maybe the quality of the
links is really important.

In project management, you often have to come up with some estimate

based on incomplete data at the beginning of a project. You might have
estimates that are certain from -50% to +150% which is a HUGE range.
But you have to start somewhere, make assumptions, and get started.

Offsite SEO Questions

• What is the Google Sandbox and is it real?

• What are dofollow links?

• What are nofollow links? Do nofollow links help?

• How do you do guest posting?

• How to Get Links to Affiliate Posts

About the author: Doug Cunnington is the founder of Niche Site Project.
He shows people how to create Affiliate Sites using project management
and a proven, repeatable framework. Doug loves creating systems, using
templates, and brewing beer (but usually not at the same time).

41 comments… add one ↓

Hieu Nguyen
I totally agree with you. I have the same ranking improvement with
non relevant PBN. Because niche relevant PBN costs much more money to
build or build links, so I choose general PBNs. Who know when it will be not
effective anymore, but now it’s very powerful!

Reply

Doug cunnington
Hey Hieu – Thanks for the comment.

It’s pretty tough to find high authority domains that are relevant too. It’s
good to just have the authority behind the links.

Reply

Winston
Hey Doug,

This is a bit out of topic, so hopefully you bear with me. I wanted to ask if
you knew about getting penalties of -40 and -60. A couple of my sites
suddenly got hit with them (one each). I think those are what hit them
because that’s how they appeared. The rank moved exactly that much
downwards.

Granted I did make a few changes a couple of days ago, but they were very
cosmetic in nature so I’m not sure. The thing is the 2 I did change were the
ones hit.

I was wondering if you had heard or seen anything of these penalties, and if
there were link related (which one, anchor, bad links, etc) or content related,
or anything else.
Thanks.

Reply

Doug cunnington
Hey Winston – Sorry! That’s a huge bummer.

I don’t know of anything specifically for -40/-60 drops. It does seem very
odd they would both drop.

What exactly did you change on the sites?

Reply

Winston
I just figured it out. I did lose a couple of strong links. It did
take a bit of digging to figure it out, since I use free ahrefs and
majesticseo. The penalty was the first thing that crossed my mind
because that’s what’s always the scary one I guess.

Reply

Ruan Oosthuizen
Yeah, I was pretty floored by this too, Doug. It gets better though…
the specific article is currently ranked at #10 (1st page!). Let’s see how far it
goes up…

BTW…you shared sometime here on NSP about getting Wikipedia links,

remember? Well, I’m quite the action taker so I have 3 Wiki links pointing to
this same site at the moment. Two are PR4 and the other PR6. They’re not
crawled yet and thus not picked up by any backlink-checking service yet, but
I bet those will surely help with trust- and citation flow in due time. Gosh, I
just wish those were do-follow, eh? lol

Reply

Ruan Oosthuizen
I forgot to ask (since no one else have yet), getting high-metric
expired domains, any resources or services you’d like to
share/recommend? Apart from Jon’s that is, as I am about to order my
first package from him, but I just thought it would be nice to check out
other services too. I know about DomainJawa too…

Reply

Doug cunnington
Ruan – I have a source and I’ll email you directly.

If anyone else is interested, email me.

Reply

Ruan Oosthuizen
Thanks buddy!

Stuart
Be interested to know the prices they charge Doug, drop
me a line. Cheers stu

Avi Lang
Please email me as well

Doug cunnington
 Hey Ruan – It’s at #10 now. Wow!

Yes, the Wikipedia tactic is very good. � That’s for email subscribers
only…

Fantastic about the other site linking to your site b/c of your wikipedia
reference!

Reply

Ruan Oosthuizen
Oh shucks, sorry – I didn’t realize! �

Yeah – I think I got pretty lucky with that link!

Reply

Doug cunnington
No worries! It may entice people to sign up for the
newsletter. �

Ruan Oosthuizen
Well, they’d be CRAZY not to. I can vow it is well worth
it! �

John
hi Doug,
thanks for the email, or newsletter.. I now have 4 expired domains, planning
to buy another 1 domain so total of 5 expired domains this April, the highest
i paid was $115 against a proxy bid, but for the 3 domains i only paid like
$12+ ..

only 1 domain is up for now with 1 post with no links yet.. that domain is not
directly related to my niche site but i will order an article that will mention my
niche keyword…

1. For the 5 domains most of them are not directly related but have .org and
.edu links pointing at them, so since im new to this pbn thing, i cant say
anything yet, but with my experience regarding relevance using newly
created blogs — relevance got my amazon niche site rank number 3 way
back 2011. so i say relevance greater than authority just like Jon said.

2. I have seen a lot of expired domains like church, news, photography that
are now being used as pbn, and the niche site they link to are ranking high,
so i say old domains with lots of clean backlinks though pass the juice..

3. Irrelevant expired domains used right away as the domain for the niche
site still ranks very well, in fact i saw 2 domain names with personal names
on them… the domain name 1. is personal website of a woman, domain 2.
is a personal website of a car racer’ son. Both are ranking top 3 in google..

4. And im very interested in your experiment now…

Reply

Doug cunnington
Hey John, glad you’re enjoying the emails.

Sounds like you’re building up a very nice stable of domains! Keep up

the good work.
Reply

John
Yup i am,

i read Jon is offering 5 domain PBN but he is not hosting it on $1

hosting nor seo-hosting… how about your expired domains Doug,
where you host it? now i have 1 in hostica, i learn about it from Alex
becker.. but i may follow Jon on hosting to $3 to $5 hosts..

Reply

Doug cunnington
Hey John, I host some domains on $1 – $2 per month
hosting services and some others on HostNine. I really
recommend HostNine if you are going to have about 10 or more
domains. It just makes it easier to set up domains on separate C
Blocks. Get the reseller account if you find that the HostNine
plans work for you.

Here is my affiliate link if you want to check it out:

https://nichesiteproject.com/hostnine

Sam Noor
Hey John, how best can i check the backlinks to my site ?

Reply

Doug Cunnington
Sam, you can check in MOZ’s Open Site Explorer,
ahrefs.com, and majestic site explorers. They will all have slightly
 different backlinks but should give you a good idea.

Reply

Nathan Rossow
Good info that’s interesting the effect it had even if the link wasn’t
niche relevant. That is some good movement through Google. I’m about to
add some PBN links to my niched site, hopefully it will finally start ranking for
keywords again.

Reply

Doug cunnington
Hey Nathan – Cool! Good luck. It’s been a few days now so has
your site moved up in the rankings?

Reply

Nathan Rossow
I’ve seen some movement. I only have on link from a PBN
right now, and my few keywords that were on the 8th or 9th page
have moved to the 5th, and 6th and a couple keywords that weren’t
ranking showed up on the 7th page. So not bad, I have another link
in the queue, and plan to add 1 or 2 a week for the next few weeks.
Fingers crossed I’ll get on the 1st and 2nd in the next month or two,
and start getting some traffic.

Reply

Curt
Hey Doug, what did you use for anchor text? Exact, brand, URL…?
Thanks, cool little experiment.

Reply

Doug cunnington
Hey Curt – Sorry it took a while to get back to you here. �

It was exact match anchor text for a fairly long keyword phrase. It was
within a sentence that was out of place in the article…but the sentence
itself was on the topic of the target site.

Reply

angeladav
Rank Tracker which is part of the Powersuite tools now has a
feature
called ‘keyword difficulty’ which works out how difficult it is to crack
a keyword given the links that the competition has (which may make it
easier for people) – http://www.link-assistant.co.uk/rt-keyword-difficulty

I found for example that a site was sitting at #1 with only 30 links – but they
were from PR3 / 4 type sites – which I guess goes to show it’s quality rather
than quantity – I’m currently in the process of trying do the same

Reply

PrepperFarm
I’d like to see a continuation of your experiment to see if a few
additional links could really get it to the top 10. I’m wondering how severe
the law of diminishing returns is and what rank you get topped out at.
Reply

Baba Vanga
Hey Doug,
Thanks for sharing your backlinks experiment. Want to share my experience
with “building” backlinks for one of my blogs. It is in a low to moderate
competition niche, but all those sites that came on the first page of google
were not dedicated to that particular subject. In other words they just had a
post about it, but that’s all – sites with high authority. So I decided to build up
a blog from scratch that is entirely dedicated on the niche – or micro niche
blog that only contains content on pretty much few keywords. I rolled up my
sleeves and did about 95 articles – some long enough (800-1000 words)
others much shorter. As you can imagine I only focused on putting up some
content. After 1 month and a half, for one of the keywords I’m on 7th position
in google, and for another major keyword I’m on the 11th position in google
– NO BACK LINKS building whatsoever.

So in my view, if you have a dedicated blog on one niche, and do a good

number of quality posts, you can certainly outrank even sites that have very
high PR, thousands of backlinks, and thousands of articles – at least that’s
my experience.

Anyhow, thank you Doug for sharing this helpful info – keep my email in your
newsletter loop, as I want to be updated of other helpful tips and tricks
regarding SEO!

Regards

Reply
 Doug Cunnington
Thanks Baba! Great case study on content with no backslinks.

Reply

Tonmoy
Hello Dough,

Thanks for the great content, man. Many guys just send mails to their sub
list but they never response them. But you are the best guy who always
response me �

Reply

Doug Cunnington
Hey Tonmoy, thanks for the comment. I appreciate the
compliment.

Reply

sonia
hi, thanks for such a nice experiment, i would not mine to do this
experiment. will come back if it will help me.
thanks

sonia

Reply

Doug Cunnington
Hey Sonia, thanks for stopping by & for the comment.
 Reply

Raj
Hi Doug, Shall I use Fiverr guest posts? Are you done any
experiment?

Reply

Randy
Hi Doug,

Do you have a post on your site that goes over how many PBN links to add
over x amount of days? For example, best practice to add 1 PBN link to the
page you’re promoting every 3-4 days or some other interval?

Reply

Doug Cunnington
I do not have that data, Randy. Good question though…I think if
you add a link once a week, that’s a good place to start. And I haven’t
ever tried to see if there is a faster way, but I assume it won’t matter too
much compared to several other factors. (Like the authority, anchor text,
and so on…)

Reply

Raj
Where I can buy Domains for pbn?

Reply
Abd Raaz
If I use a lot of links from the same sites does it make sense?

Reply

Doug Cunnington, PMP

Not really…no.

Reply

abd Raaz
Great and thanks for replying me. I have one more question?

I just create a new website 3 page only and its for lead generation and my
targeted keyword is “immigration solicitors leeds” the keyword difficulty is
only 2, so I made 50 local citations and 100 social profile backlinks and what
can I do to get it number 1-3 position?

Reply

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