Awhile back I talked about the importance of traffic diversity; that is the importance of ensuring that all of your traffic isn’t coming from just one place. This was in the wake of the Content Farm update, later renamed the Panda Update after the affectionate nickname given by his coworkers to the programmer at Google who spearheaded and played a pivotal role in the update in question. The idea was that no one traffic source is guaranteed and reliable for all time whether that’s paid traffic, organic SEO, etc. because one substantial change in the policies of that traffic source and your ocean of traffic has been stopped up to resemble a trickling stream overnight unless you have plenty of other traffic sources coming in. Today I’m going to talk about something completely different: the importance of link diversity.

Link Diversity

Traffic and SEO are inextricably linked, but this primarily will refer to search engine optimization and the paramount role which link diversity plays in it.

Just like you don’t want all of your traffic coming from the same place, you don’t want all of your links coming from the same place. Take a look at these diagrams which further illustrate my point.

Would you rather have just one VERY excited zebra vouching for your site:

OR would you rather have an entire savannah worth of animals (and a canoe, apparently) vouching for it:

The answer is pretty clear, variety wins out time and time again. Google doesn’t want to see just one site or one type of site linking to your site because that says to them that your content isn’t good enough to get links from other sources, and it looks questionable at best.

Just like if you were shopping around and were interested in buying a new product, you’d rather read lots of testimonials from different people about that product as opposed to just one very excited person who likely is just a shill for that company; eventually you want to hear from some other people to get some more opinions.

The moral of the story is to make sure that you not only procure links from a variety of article directories, but from other types of sites like blogs, bookmarks, RSS, forums. Link diversity is one of the big Google ranking factors; if you check out the diagram in that post you’ll see that it accounts for the second biggest factor in determining how you rank and also ties into and figures into the biggest factor overall.