Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote two of the greatest posts ever on SEOmoz -What Makes A Link Worthy Post - Part 1 and What Makes A Link Worthy Post - Part 2. Since we're getting close to three years since those posts went live and the SEO world has changed considerably, some of us thought that it was about time to pull some new numbers and see how the community has changed in regards to what people link to.
Just like Casey's posts, I have pulled the individual linking root domains (LRDs) instead of the total link counts, which gives us a better picture of how wide content spreads since we are eliminating the fact that one site could have the link on 1,000 pages.
I have done this for just the posts since Casey's Part 2 went live on November 4th, 2009. I also took a random sample of 500 posts since then and pulled the link metrics for them.
For the purposes of this post, I pulled:
- Number of LRDs
- Number of thumbs up
- Number of comments
- Types of media in the post (videos, images, lists, presentations)
- Category
- Word count
- Author
I decided not to pull social data because I did that back in July 2011 and people hated on it. I decided to keep it to links and the other numbers, and not try to imply correlation or causation.
What I am not doing here
To be clear, I am not talking about whether or not these posts rank well, or whether or not they were "good" posts. Rather, I am presenting you the data/numbers and letting you decide what to do with them.
I should also state that since some categories had more posts in them than others, I normalized the data by dividing the number of posts against the sum of the metric, to get an average. This took away any skewing based on popularity of the category. Here is an example of non-normalized linking root domains to a category:
And this is what it looks like normalized:
It's not a HUGE difference, but for the integrity of our data, we want to do this to give a true picture.
Let's go!
Posts with images
First, it has long been postulated that posts with images receive more links than posts without images, but is that true? Does the data tell us this?
Yep, it sure does.
Comments by category
I also wondered if the number of comments on a post correlated to links. Does getting more comments on a post mean that there will probably be more links to it, thus we should encourage more comments so that we have a better chance of getting links?
First, here are the categories that get the most comments (aka generate the most discussion):
We see that the whitehat/blackhat posts tend to generate the most discussion, followed by conversation rate optimization, consulting tips and tricks, and search engine trends. Surprisingly (to me), linkbuilding comes in at #10.
But do comments correlate to links?
There seems to be a bit of a correlation, but I don't think it is large enough to necessarily justify generating comments and community just for the links. There are other reasons to do it that are stronger than linkbuilding.
Amount of content
Our dear Dr Pete wrote a post back at the end of 2011 about Moz’s most popular content, in which he saw that there was possibly a correlation between longer content and the number of links a post gained. I’ve always loved the longreads websites and longer pieces of writing and journalism, but is it true that longer pieces may attract more links than shorter pieces? Let’s let the data speak again.
If we visualize the 500 posts based on word count, we get this graph from largest to smallest:
Without changing the order of the data, if we visualize the links that these posts have gained, there seems to be a correlation between longer content and links:
Interesting! #longreads has long been one of my favorite hashtags to check out on Twitter and this validates another reason for writing longer content.
Does linking out increase links?
I tire of all the posts that I see written talking about “building links by linking out.” These posts confuse correlation with causation. However, I decided to use the data provided by the ScreamingFrog export and see if linking out really did correlate to linking root domains in. Here’s what I found:
There does seem to be a slight correlation between the number of links going externally and the number of linking root domains coming in. Once again, remember that correlation does not equal causation and you cannot say that since you link out, you’ll get more links.
What kind of content do we like to talk about?
Even though tag clouds don’t help your SEO onsite, and in my opinion look dumb and even could get you gobsmacked by a Penguin, they can be useful for finding common themes. So, here are the themes often used in SEOmoz blog headlines:
Average LRDs by type of media
Here’s the one you’ve all been waiting for. In Casey’s post, he showed the following graph, which showed that content with all three media types he pulled was most likely to have the most links:
Since this is an updated post, I wanted to run the data again. This was the most surprising graph I found, because it seems that on SEOmoz, posts with just images tend to get more links than posts with all three media types I pulled (lists, images, and video)! Check it out:
I really do not know how to explain this, other than maybe these are the posts that are most often scraped?
In regards to video, notice that most of the posts on the SEOmoz blog that just have video are Whiteboard Fridays. Therefore, I must say that your mileage may vary when it comes to posts with just videos, as this data shows that the links are probably influenced by the fact that Whiteboard Friday has been branded and is always high quality and educational. You can’t just put videos into a post and expect it to attract more links simply because of video.
Just for fun
Let's have a little fun with the data. Just for fun, guess who gets the most links per post? Let me give you a hint: there is only one. And guess who ranks #22? This guy.
Who gets the most thumbs up on average? Rand wins with Eppie, Oli, and Wil close behind.
That’s it! I hope this post has been instructional and enlightening for you, or at least used data to confirm what you’ve already always believed.
I’d love to hear your comments.
So you're saying that long posts with images get links? Well that's a good thing for me!
In all seriousness, this is a good bit of analysis. I just hope people don't begin to create long content for the sake of it being long. Because the missing element that you can't quite track here is ... quality.
You could argue that Rand, Eppie, Oli and Wil produce the highest quality content and are therefore rewarded. Then again it could be the cult of personality (aka popularity) that creates this effect.
Of course this is also a closed ecosystem of sorts with a distinct brand and following. So what I'd really enjoy seeing is to have this same analysis performed on:
I think this would be a great collaborative project that would give the community even greater insight into what type of content is most compelling.
[edit] And where's the LOLcat Image to Links graph?
Agreed, AJ. I think it would be a great project for all of these different sites to work on, or for one person to tackle. Maybe Casey would fire up his script that he used a couple of years ago on his original posts and do it for all of these sites.
You're right that there are a lot of other factors at play, which is why I'm not implying causation. Rather, correlation is interesting enough, plus people should never just take what someone else says and blindly follow it. Do your own research and find what works for your niche and site (though by saying this on your comment I'm preaching to the choir!)
Yes, I really want that multi-site study to be completed. You could even compare the types of content for each site and their relative ratios. Even better if you have an author who has content on multiple sites to see if their statistics change dramatically (in particular in relation to the average for that site) from site to site.
I would love that as well!
So someone do it!
Dude you have to label your x and y axis on the graphs man!
Example:https://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/links-based-on-wordcount.PNG
I assume y vertical is words on page and x is represents the site number?
X is the number of words and Y is the number of links (not linking root domains, mind you).
That explains a lot thanks - had me guessing for a while
Sorry about that.
Still confused. It looks to me that X is a post number where post number is ordered by word count, yes? The x axis is dimensionless.
No doubt the content with images attract more attention than other long text based boring content. I have even noticed in social media sites like facebook insights that the posts which has got images in it were further shared by the users. So no doubt multimedia inside a blog makes it more valuable.
Hi John, nice post. I like the correlation data.
I think it's very interesting how popularity doesn't always mean the most links. I say this based on thumbs up data. Paddy isn't at the top for thumbs up, but he is at the top for links. His content in my experience has been simply more useful over time. And the more useful something is over time, the more links it will receive IMO.
Thanks!
agreed. useful=more links. funny=more links. and in general, unique=more links.
Love this John! Definitely some good takeaways from this data, which reinforces a lot of practices that I we push for content marketing. Also glad to see I'm one of the top authors with a high avg. # of thumbs up, even if that is based on one really solid post haha. I got another big one coming up soon so i'm confident i'll stay up there ; )
Thank you for your work !
First of all, sorry for my poor english guys.
About longer posts :
As you saied, correlation is not allways an interesting insight ! and for my opinion i'm not sure that it's really great to know that longer posts have more backlinks.
Honestly, how a metric like "world count" could explain link attraction ? This cannot be a serious metric. Anyway when you find a correlation their is allways an explanation behind it, and i suppose that best posts are usualy longers than athers, because the best insights comes from writers that treats them subject deeper.
So may be, best posts are just usually longer, instead longer posts are not necessary the best posts. Do people link to a post because its word count ?
Now lets go back to our first goal, searching to understand "How to attract more links ?"
As we saw, "writing long posts" cannot be a valuable way to get more popular, instead everybody know that getting popular is all about quality.
May be a qualitative research would be better than a quantative one to get the best insights about "what makes the differences between a linkable and a less linkable post" ?
I totally agree, Walid. I've written SEO copy for many clients, and longer posts always take far longer to compose. Longer articles are generally more thoroughly researched and have more to offer.
Killer collation between length and links, do you find that more linkbait posts get way more links?
John - this is some pretty cool data for our niche. I like taking this idea and applying it to an in-house writing team. Use it as a fun, motivating factor to get every writer to up their game a bit.
Hello John,
I think certainly a good start but a shame to leave out the social signals as I think that is much more exciting and certainly a large bunch of links being built that should be tracked. One interesting would be the insight around the content of the topics and if more advanced statistically focused topics outperformed 101 guides.
David
Agreed that social signals would be interesting to pull, but I disagree that these are "links being built". Social influences rankings to be sure, but they don't qualify as "links" in my opinion therefore I left them out of this post. However, I'm more than willing to throw the URLs that I used for this post into an Excel sheet and share it so that you can do the work and share it with the rest of us.
On the note of "advanced" content, this is EXTREMELY hard to do. The only way to even start doing it, that I can think of, is to have the posts qualify themselves (ie "advanced guide" or "beginner's guide to..."), but this would still give us a very dirty dataset. Even Google seems to have issues with determining level of content. They use reading level, which is also a decent start but still doesn't give us advanced or beginner content.
Thanks for the comment!
I have just read your post and totally agree what you say.The only question puzzles me very long time is:How come some of the web site ranks well and they have have no contents what so ever. Please explain to me how it works.example site is: https://www.overstock.com/Jewelry-Watches/Jewelry/Sterling-Silver,/metal,/13/dept.htmlI have search and search couldn't find any content or article what so ever. Unless I am not seen it.In the other hand my own web site https://www.balisilverjewellry.com/ has content and the rest but still not ranking at all.Is it just the juicy healthy backlinks does the trick? Thanks advance for replying.Sebo
I think you know the answer to this already, the links. Overstock.com has a pretty healthy backlink profile, even if it's not for that exact department page, the domain strength is still a pretty large influencing factor in results, and i would guess the page performs fairly well in CTR as well, with overstock.com having good trust and brand integrity with consumers.
Good read this.
Social "signals" are still links though, just a different type of link.
I have been once again humbled... how in the world does this post get any thumbs down (2 so far) and yet other fluff posts here get no thumbs down?
And I thought I knew how the masses react to things.
This post is gold.
(BTW: I always have to edit my posts for line breaks here.)
Thanks Markus :-)
One of the interesting post of moz. You have brilliantly described about the content that getting more links. I like that your graphical representation and comparison because it is more understandable then written information. I don' believe that longer pieces may attract more links than shorter pieces because links are depends on quality of content. You have also discussed interesting point that content with images gets higher links compare to without images because it is very true. Thanks for sharing this interesting article with us. .
Thanks for the comment Sanket. You can choose to believe it or not. I'm just showing the data.
Like John said, a longer piece is more likely to have been written by someone with expertise, exploring a topic in-depth and providing useful answers. It's harder to write the longer posts: more merit, more links.
John, one thing I'm very curious about in light of this data: is there a correlation between the presence of a link to a free SEO tool (such as iPullRank's or Eppie's) or to a downloadable resource (template, slideshow or spreadsheet such as SEOGadget/ Richard Baxter's) and the number of LRD's?
You showed the low correlation of outlinks viz. inlinks as a broad category, while media was segmented by either lists, images or video. I have a strong suspicion that if outlinks were similarly segmented by the presence of (for example) blog post/article, general website, and/or an original Tool or downloadable resource to make SEO life easier, that you'd see a very different graph.
Since the preponderance of LRDs are to On-page/ Site Optimization Category posts, perhaps links to free, useful tools for work within that category could account for it.
Hmm.. pretty interesting analysis. Nice to see it from members of SeoMoz here... ;)
Very interesting with the collation between length and links. Also any way you can link the graphs to larger images. My eyes are shot trying to read them.
+1 on the image being link to a larger rez files - it will be great to review that data in depth although the general idea is there - it will just be a nice addon.Thanks,
eyes were killing me looking at the who gets most thumbs up, larger imaged would be fantastic if possible mate =)
Here you go: https://www.johnfdoherty.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/avg-comments-by-category.png
Yes, please link ALL the graphs to larger images. Also (and I'm sure it's just me), but I'm having a hard time understanding some of the graphs without X and Y descriptions. I'm getting slightly confused deciphering what the numbers are supposed to mean on the Word Count and Links graphs.
Really wish I could increase the image sizes to see more detail.
Great post and I have to say the part I got my attention the most, was the twitter tag #longreads. The rest of the information was spot on and of great value! I just didn't know that that twitter tag was out there. I'll have to check it out and use it on my posts. (I tend to have a lot of long reads, with hopefully good information).
I'm going to digest this information and point people in this direction. Readers on my site, Ingenious Internet Income, will certainly find this information useful. Being strategic in your blog posting is important. Seeing and understanding this data can be extremely helpful to building a new site. Thanks as always for the great info.
Good read,
The most interesting chart to me was the Avg # of LRD's by type of media. What really caught me off guard was how much videos tend to make a difference. I think this is mostly because I'm biased against most videos. From my general experience, when the link takes me to a video, I'm about to waste 3-5 minutes of my day. I even tend to just read the transcripts on WBFs then watch the video.
I think your then and now metrics show people starting to lean to my way of thinking.
Thanks for you time in compiling this.
Remember that this data is from one niche (the online marketing niche) where people may be less apt to watch videos within posts as they take more of a time investment, as you say. I personally struggle to find time to watch videos within blog posts, but I will spend hours of time on Vimeo watching content that is very conducive to visuals, such as adrenaline sports. So there will definitely be a niche bias with any data set. Just keep that in mind.
Thanks for the comment :-)
Thanks for this John! Those two posts by Casey are two that I link to *all* the time when people ask what kind of content gets the most links. It will be great to have an updated version to send people to!
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Nice insights into what makes a great (link earning) post on SEOmoz, particularly for any budding youmozers!
Things become difficult and difficult but will become more difficult since the purpose of Google is to sift the wheat from the wastage.
Good post. I wonder if it would be possible to do the same study but based on a website like facebook or twitter, to see what kind of content gets the most links/shares etc there?
"I also took a random sample of 500 posts since then and pulled the link metrics for them. For the purposes of this post, I pulled..."
Does SEO Moz's CMS allow you to do this easily? Or did you check every page manually. Even if their CMS didn't allow you to pull these metrics, how would/did you streamline the process?
(Rand, please don't kill me).
I scraped it. I scraped it all using Google Docs and ImportXML, and used the Moz API to get the link metrics.
Query "ImportXML"https://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/guide-to-google-docs-importxml/https://seogadget.co.uk/playing-around-with-importxml-in-google-spreadsheets/https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/importxml-cookbookhttps://zoomspring.com/learn-importxml-tutorial/
This is an awesome post, something like Dr. Pete was talking about when it comes to "big content". Very nice data and information, thank you for that!
Yes I'm agree with you truly very impressive post that should be on the of moz.
I have to agree with AJ, above. Quality is the most important factor. Obviously there's a need for balance, but if you really want to create trust, you need to make sure your content is worth reading.
I also agree with Walid: good posts are generally longer. They are certainly much more time consuming to write, word-for-word.
Hey,
The hashtag longreads leads to a dead page. Nice post but what do you think about effect of length of word count to the position of the post in the SERPs. I am thinking of doing an in-depth research on it. Would love your opinion on it.
Regards,
Divi Fernando
Hey John,
Nice findings there, but i guess they would certainly change when your brand is not as big as moz. Interesting data nevertheless.
P.S: The #longreads is a broken link.
Quick question: Do longer posts feature high in SERPs? (assuming all the other ranking factors remain the same)
Looking forward to the answer.
Thanks,
Divi Fernando
Hello John, I really aprreciate the graphs that you've shared. If you have a large number of comments it does not mean that you can get more links for your website. We are talking about high quality comments not number of comments.
Great article! Definitely lots of great names included!
We drew up an updated list of SEO blogs for 2015:
https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/seo/top-50-seo-blogs-to-follow-in-2015/.
Feel free to let us know what you think or tell us if we left anyone out!
An interesting correlation between linking and popularity with results I did not expect. Thanks for this excellent article.
I love seeing that video is actually ranked 5th overall in the chart with number of links per type of content! And video was present in four out of the first three types. Really confirms what we at Treepodia have been talking about for awhile.
Superb article John!
Now you gave me something to dig into for a couple of hours.
Most of the sources I found about what strategies work today don't really cut it, but this does! As the Internet matures, so will the search engines. I'm actually looking at creating viral content and making sure every piece of content I post on my channels are of superb quality. In fact, I make sure spinning is done at a minimum level. Great posts may take longer to write, but the time spent is worth it.
ive done some heavy research and found that reviewing products (not of your competitors) could earn you amazing authority-powered links.
This is a great piece, I also always like the nature of viral content as well. It can really do some amazing things.
Interesting stuff. However I think your analysis is a bit biased towards quantity, not quality. A contributor who wrote a large number of posts is a lot more likely to have received more thumbs up, comments and links. It would be great if you could divide the above by the number of posts per author so we can see which authors' content is more popular.
Did you read the opening paragraph? This is exactly what I did.
Thanks for this John! Those two posts by Casey are two that I link to *all* the time when people ask what kind of content gets the most links. It will be great to have an updated version to send people to!
Sweet! Links ftw!
Great stuff, with great affords. I appreciate you. Great job to discuss this kind of very interesting topics. Thanks...!!!
Linking building is becoming more sophisticated with each google update it always better to use latest methods to build links .
Thanks to giving insight on this.
Good post !!
Nice post, John. You've pulled some really interesting insights here. For me, one insight is that I need to give various forms of media more thought in my posts. I spend a lot of time writing, and then add media as an afterthought. This is probably a mistake, as your data might imply.
I suspect that there is (as your speculated) something of a Matthew Effect going on with the authors - that is, the connected get more connections. If more connected authors choose certain topics more often, that could easily skew the data, e.g. on categories. I don't think there's anything you could have done about that: I thought about normalizing data based on authors, but the data set would need to be huge, and the author-quality connection would be confounding. Anyone willing to write for several months under two different names chosen at random? :)
Anyway, thanks for the analysis and great work.
Excellent work John - I,for one, appreciate it. As someone who has spent the morning trying to get links into his Psychotherapy client's site, this little break was not only relaxing, also very educational
Thanks man!
agreed, old school tactics won't work. combining psychology thinking with new-age link earning tactics is worth way, way more.
Hah! Beat you by 3 spots in the Sum Links by Author graph John :)
All joking aside, great correlational data on length vs links. Definitely validates that in-depth content is what leads to links more often than content that's not, something I knew was true but didn't have any hard core evidence to back up. Now I do!
I think I'm going to have to get used to you beating me at a lot of things :-)
Seriousness aside, thanks. It's always great to find that data both validates and destroys our assumptions.
The long reads graphs are pretty interesting. I know we're trying to turn everything into sound bites with headlines and sub-headlines, one line paragraphs--anything short and quick a reader can remember, but long form content still has it's place and can be incredibly to both you and your readers.
Thanks for the comment, Nick. People on the Internet are known to skim, but this doesn't necessarily mean they want just soundbites. Soundbites are rarely memorable or sticky - it's a nugget and they keep going. My strategy when it comes to writing for the Web is to write longer content, but to have it broken into sections using headers, and also to have a lot of examples (images, videos, etc). This way, someone who wants to skim can do so (such as this post, where if you just skim and look at the graphs you get most of the information), but if you read deeper you can glean even more from the text. The goal is not to provide people little nuggets of info, but rather to drive them to read even deeper.
I appreciate your thoughts!
Agree with you, John. Sections with headers make the content easier to digest... And make it more memorable to link to. And absolutely... The end goal is to get them to "engage" (read deeper) with the piece.
Certainly makes the case for agencies to start having serious conversations about what they offer to clients with their services. Content strategy and development is becoming more and more integral. And this helps make the case.
Still surprising in this time constrained society. But then this industry does attract analytical types. I wonder if we'd see the same correlation if we were analyzing another industry site.
Just curious, how many publications were used in this study, and what was the count of unique LRDs?
Thanks for giving us current data to reinforce our recommendations! Extremely well done.
Very interesting. You might try turning your two stack-ranked graphs, words and # of links, into a scatter plot by making one of them the X and one of them the Y in Excel.
Then you can do a best fit line and have Excel calculate the R-squared value. People argue about what matters but anything greater than 10% (.10) is pretty interesting in our field I think - sometimes you get a really high R-squared value like .4 or .8 - it runs between 0 and 1.
Great post, no awesome post, will be coming back to this later when I have more time to digest. I've always thought longer posts would attract more links, hell there is a greater chance that something therein interests somebody else! Would love to hear any other takes on why Moz posts with images only tend to get more links?
A very tiny point if you re-use this elsewhere - there is a reference to 'conversation optimization' in the Comments by Category text you might want to fix up...
or maybe we should not 'talk' about that...
Thanks for a great post :)
I found the bit about long reads interesting. I find myself linking to short reads like Seth Godin blog posts just as much as long reads...at least I think I do.
i'm the same, I think it's mainly cause I read the shorter posts and skim the longer posts!
This is a great exercise to do on clients and their competitors to see what kind of topics and media types work best for links in their particular industries.
Good job! This is a great topic. You have a good analysis and impressive interpretation of data. I wish that could be larger of its size, I find it hard to understand but still thumbs up to that!
Hi John,
very good analysis and interesting data, which somehow confirm what is a general gut sensation.I especially found interesting the chart with the correlation between number of links and different kind of media used.Said that, have you noticed cases - let's say exceptions - where a post apparently not keen to be linked accordingly to that chart, instead revealed itself to be a link-winner?
Finally, to see that International Issues has such a poor performance is somehow a delusion. Said that... I would suggest, if someone wants to do this kind of search with his own blog's categories, to go further and don't stop just counting the raw data, but to go deeper and analyze the quality of the links. Doing so, maybe, you can discover that a category that gains less links than other, maybe it is something to cultivate still exactly for the quality of the domain linking to its content.
Hi John,
Thanks for sharing this. This will help me to build content on my new blog. I am sure that will help also many others. :)
This is great stuff, John!
I was surprised about the long reads getting more links. I thought it would be more like a bell curve there. I confess I don't give enough attention to the long reads myself, although I do appreciate thorough posts.
I think it would be interesting to look at the data from another industry. Sometimes I wonder if we are anomalous in the internet marketing community because we know the value of commenting, linking, and sharing. I would be fascinated to see this same thing done for another industry, especially the data about posts with other forms of media.
Lots to think about!
P.S. I agree with Rich.wan--labeling of the axis would have helped, but I figured it out.
Personally, i write content based on what is headlining on the internet searches and then post and comment on appropriate websites. I have had pages viewed up to 120 times on one article and i'm getting very good links.
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Great stuff as usual, John. As you said, it's nice to see the #s confirm what you already believe in! I had a feeling black hat vs. white hat posts would yield a high (or highest) volume of comments since it's probably one of the most controversial topics in search. Thanks for the post!
you could make a 35,000 word post to gain links or you could make some "real company shit" like SEER does - https://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/ to generate 100s of links =) That been said their is defiantly some hours in design work and content behind that one =)
But yeah nice post, good too see the correlations on what is popular and whats not, thanks for putting the post together.
Yep, linkworthy content takes time, I think is the takeaway there. You could do something like SEER did, you could create a linkbait guide, you could create a video guide, you could create a Beginner's Guide. It's not necessarily that it's the longform factor here, but it is correlated. I also didn't qualify that length out by types of media contained either, so there could be another mitigating factor within there.
That said, there is a correlation that people should pay attention to.
Pretty and nice post. I've read full of article and I've found lots of interesting thing inside. Amount of content & fact of Google penguin. Just this one i like.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts...