Quote:
Probably the biggest mistake website owners make when link building is mistaking QUANTITY for QUALITY.
It is no longer a game of "who has the most?", but instead the quality of the link is evaluated.
Having too many low quality backlinks will actually hurt your site now.
So what is the difference?

A high quality backlink will first be from a RELEVANT website. That means that if your site is about "cats" then for the backlink to be relevant the site linking to you should also be about "cats" or at least "pets" in general. Ideally the page on which your link appears should be about "cats" and should not contain more than a few "outbound" links. An idealized example would be...
If your website is dedicated to a solution for "cat shedding", then a high quality link would be one on a general site about "cats", having that link in the middle of an article about "hairballs" would be the best possible location. The highest quality link would be if the main site is considered an "authority" site... like "WikiCats" or "YahooCats".
A low quality link would be anything other than a high quality link. Even if you got a link on the Jaguar Motors site, it would be low quality because it's not RELEVANT. It's cute, but cute doesn't count in SEO.

I agree totally. Since I have a lot of blogs, I am constantly getting spammed by the backlink bots. Some of the notes they try to push through can be funny sometimes ... other times they really bother me. Of course, I keep the spam comments off, but I can sure see how backlinks like that would not be relevant at all!

I read an article the other day that said a blog needed thousands of backlinks to get a high search ranking. That makes no sense to me, because I can't imagine anyone getting that many backlinks without using one of those bots. You would think Google and other search engines wouldn't like that.

Paula