As you may be aware, this site and its sister site brath.com have received a fair amount of media attention. Over the year, we’ve observed the effects of this and come to the conclusion that those links might not be as valuable from an SEO perspective.
This site has received a fair amount of links from trustworthy sources, and the sister site brath.com has received even more. Links have come to both of our sites from sources like Svenska Dagbladet, CNN, Yahoo, and several others throughout the year. The truth is that brath.com has received links from about 150 domains of similar caliber over the year, and in all cases, they have been part of their editorial content, written by professional journalists.
We have, of course, measured the effects
As you can probably guess, we closely monitor our rankings and search traffic, and yes, we have seen an increase in organic traffic over the past year, on both sites. But not more than in previous years. Despite a massive amount of attention and a wealth of links from sites that should be considered a link builder’s wet dream, the results have largely been underwhelming.
Granted, this is a small sample, far too small to make a scientific assessment, but at least for these two sites (and it’s hard to conduct a fair empirical study on this), the links from high-powered sites haven’t made a significant difference in terms of ranking and traffic.
What could this be due to?
Remember, this is speculation, but I wanted to bring up the thought — perhaps there are others out there with similar thoughts or experiences? The conclusion we’ve reached is that since these newspapers (which, to a large extent, they are) have long sold advertising and likely haven’t used nofollow attributes or the like in many cases, Google has likely chosen to disregard their links. At least from a PageRank perspective.
I can’t swear that this applies to all the sites or even that it applies 100%, maybe they just downweight these links. Perhaps other factors are at play, but for these two sites and for a few others we can’t use as examples, it definitely seems so. It actually looks like a link from a decent blog is worth more than one from any of our major newspapers. That’s our perspective, what do you think?
Magnus Bråth
CEO
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.