This week I've been looking into a few finance verticals and found an interesting illustration of just how much power one trusted link can have.
Take a look at the results for "loans" and see how many links the top sites need to have to get their rankings.
Now look at the figures below and see how few links some of the sites have - proof that it's quality and not quantity even in this industry.
If you can go and find a link that is so powerful that it propels you to the top of the search engines then it can be worth paying a lot of money for.
Of course if it stands out like a sore thumb then don't expect it to last very long.
5.4 million links
3 million links
556 links (and one from economist.com)
9,000 links
13.5 million links
3400 links
37000 links
362 links (including one from economist.com).
1:30PM on 28th April 2008
It will be interesting to see how long those Economist links will continue to pass PageRank as they have been reported in quite a few different places. This is the problem with Google’s strategy of clamping down on buying and selling text links – when it comes to the big players, such as the Economist, they aren’t punished nearly as harshly as a smaller site would be.
Head of Digital at Mindshare (Ireland)
5:03PM on 28th April 2008
I think that the other thing to add here is that it's also possible that the thing that sticks out here are the sites with millions of loans. I mean really? Millions of people thought that they just had to link to a loan site? I think that's the bigger fishy smell here...
Head of Digital at Mindshare (Ireland)
5:21PM on 28th April 2008
Sorry - I meant millions of links, not loans!