So which is better SEO for your website; getting more backlinks, or improving your page content?  This is an issue I’ve been dealing with for some time now, and I think the evidence clearly shows that it is your page content that is most important.  Google is increasingly downgrading the worth of backlinks, and I recently had another example that proves it.

Specifically, I moved a large website (with over 500 web pages) into a content management system. I moved all the actual page content over from the old site to the new one – with the one big exception being that the number of pages was drastically reduced, down to about 125 web pages.  There was a new marketing director who thought if we made fewer pages, the site might be easier to navigate for the user – which is a valid point.

But how did this effect the website’s SEO values?  Why, for many of the keywords they dropped drastically, of course.  Some of the main product pages remain strong, but many of the long tail keywords have fallen off the map.  Without losing a single backlink to the site!

So this story reinforces my belief that it is your page content that needs to be addressed first when working on your site SEO.  Because unless your site is optimized for a set of keywords – how can a search engine ever rank it well?

And no, I’m not saying backlinks are worthless – I’m just saying you need to ignore the whole backlink mantra until you get your house in order.