Myth #1: Having tons of in-bound links will automatically rank your site very well. FALSE. Tons of in-bound links will only rank your site well if those links contain the keywords that you want to rank for. Say you have a site about speed boats. If you get 8,000 in-bound links whose link text is “fast boats”, you might rank very well for “fast boats”, but you won’t rank well at all for “speed boats”–unless there’s just not much competition for the keywords “speed boats”.

Having thousands of people with links that do not contain your keywords will help a little, but quality links that contain the keywords (or better yet, where the link text is the exact keywords) are 50 times more valuable. That means you need 50 times less links to rank well. So how do you know if a ranking page has in-bound links that are actually related to the keywords you want to target? How do you know if they are really optimizing for the keywords or if they are ranking well only because there’s not much competition?

It’s incredibly important that you know if your competition’s links are targeted to your keywords or not, and there’s an easy way to get this information which I’ll get to in a little bit.

Myth #2: The number of results returned for the “link:” command in a search engine is the number of links that the search engine actually counts toward the ranking of the page. FALSE. For the about.com cat pictures page, Yahoo reports 8,070 in-bound links. But I’m going to teach you a powerful little trick to find out how many inbound links Yahoo is applying to the ranking of that about.com page. Go to the Yahoo search home page: http://search.yahoo.com/

Click on the “advanced search” link next to the search button. I’ve circled it in the image below:

In the “All of these words” input box, enter the link: command for the about.com page: link:http://cats.about.com/od/catpictures Again, here’s an image of what it looks like:

Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, and change the number of results from 10 to 100, then click the “Yahoo! Search” button. There’s your answer: almost all of those 8 to 10 thousand links were considered “duplicate” links by Yahoo. This usually happens when one domain has a link on every page of its site that points to the ranking page. That domain may have 2,000 pages, and so there might be 2,000 links pointing to the ranking page, so Yahoo includes that full figure in the “Results” count. But it only actually counts a few of those links (or maybe even just one) toward the ranking of the page. So what you may have thought was really serious competition turns out to be much more moderate. I’m going to compete with a page that has only 170 in-bound links that Yahoo pays any attention to, not a page that has 8 or 10 thousand. That’s much more doable.

But when I did my research, I knew that I didn’t need 170 in-bound links either, because I knew that the links to the about.com page were not well optimized for the keywords “cat pictures”. How did I know that? I’ll tell you all about it in a little bit.