This statement, “Content is important, but links are infinitely more important” is something I would disagree on all the way.

Links will do you no good without good content. Traffic will do you no good without good content. A number 1 listing in google will do you no good without good content.

Links over content? Same as cart before the horse. You have to be ready with great original content and the ability to close sales, which again is about the content, before worrying about links and traffic.

It should read, “Links are important, but content is infinitely more important”

That is only if you are going to even make a statement like that in the first place. It’s like saying the brakes on your car are infinitely more important than the axle.

After you have your content in place and are ready to make sales, you need to build links and bring in traffic. You have to do both, it’s just that you do the content first if you want to convert sales and keep people coming back.

If you build links and drive trsffic to the site and your content isn’t ready, many of the people you attracted with those new links will never come back to your site because it had nothing to offer them.

So content first, links second.

That’s my cent and a half worth.

Rand’s counter examples were not good offerings. For example, he said link baiting has been useful for three years. Problem with that is that link baiting is not search engine optimization. Furthemore, a growing number of people have been complaining over the past few months that link baiting doesn’t drive good traffic or even earn many good links.

The SEO buzz expressions that you feel mean something really don’t mean anything specific. Too many people lob them into discussions without clarifying what they think they mean, and the contexts vary. They’re just SEO noise that conveys nothing useful to any discussions.

Links are not nearly as important to search engine optimization as the content. After all, it’s the content that we want to have appear high in search results and one page of content builds relevance to more expressions than any one link.

That is why I keep pointing out that anyone who says it’s all about links doesn’t know enough about search engine optimization to be talking about it.

Rand is welcome to his opinions but he’s not very strong on the actual SEO stuff. He’s a much better marketer than he is a technical person and his contributions to Web marketing should not be discounted.

Nonetheless, he claims to have turned away a lot of prospects because they didn’t have content he considered to be link worthy (amonth other reasons). Search engine optimization doesn’t need link worthy content. It just needs content.

Real SEOs get it.

Yup, content was, is, and always will be king.

Build a website with straight content and no inbound links and see how long you remain in the SERPs. You can’t hold positions without links. That’s why links are more important. It really isn’t hard to write a keyword-rich content page and watch it hit Page 1 within a week. To watch it stay on Page 1 takes skill and requires more than just some basic knowledge of keyword content.

Namecritic, the sentence “Links are important, but content is infinitely more important” makes sense if you take it as prima facie evidence that a web page already has content. What kind of idiot is going to build a web page without content? If it has no content it isn’t a web page. Semantics are fun only for philosophers. Practical knowledge requires more than just a definition of terms. I’m assuming that if people are building web pages then they are adding content, which any schmuck can do. It’s a lot more difficult to build links and do it correctly. But it’s also more important to the long-term survival of a web page’s presence.

[…] of. And it will make you money. I think that’s what Rand Fishkin meant when he said that links are more important than content. To that I wholeheartedly […]

You wrote, “I’m assuming that if people are building web pages then they are adding content, which any schmuck can do.”

And you said link building was more difficult.

We disagree 100%. Any schmuck doesn’t know how to put good content into a website. Any schmuck knows how to spam keywords into a website.

You also said, :Build a website with straight content and no inbound links and see how long you remain in the SERPs.”

I never said you do not need to do any link building. Anyone can misquote what someone says and then make a comment on their own misquote.

Please point to where I said you do not need links to your website and only need content.

You can’t. But your comment assumed me saying that. I stand by my statement that I actually did write. You say content is no good without links. That goes two ways. Links are no good without good content.

Search engine rankings are great. But only if you can convert the traffic when it gets to your site.

Again, you need both as I said before. But you worry about content first, then bulld links to the content. And content is at least as important to your long term survival as links.

NameCritic, no one is misquoting you. No one is putting words in your mouth. For a more clear explanation of the content vs. good content + links discussion (with a little added sarcasm), go here.