Backlinks - quality vs diversity

As far as building link wheels and any other blogs/websites linking to you is concerned - you will agree that diversity is important, the more places where you drop backlinks to you, the better.
But on the other hand managing them can be a pain.

I wonder if few but strong web 2 properties could be as good as 1000 crappy ones.
Both would receive the same amount of links (e.g. 10000)

I want to focus on lower amount because, well, lately it seems like I spend all of my time creating yet ANOTHER crappy splog or other web 2.0 junk.
I already have like 250. And the funny thing is a few of them (WPMU blogs) are already gone.
I'm starting to think - why the hell do I even bother, maybe instead of creating MORE I should focus on making them STRONGER.

Do you think 10-20 strong blogs could be as good as 1000 weak ones?

Both approaches have merit and you need a mix of both.

Like you have mentioned with your WPMU example, stuff on free hosts gets taken down on a fairly regular basis. If you invest all your resources in 10 splogs, and one gets taken down, you just lost 10% of your links.

I prefer to go broad, both for stability from the free hosted stuff getting banned, and also for diversity of backlink hosts / IPs / varied anchor text. The impact of more and more backlinks from the same host almost certainly exhibits diminishing returns. Why limit yourself to 20 hosts when you can be getting backlinks from 100? Or 1000? It also serves to muddy up your backlinks and make your link wheels less identifiable.

Personally I wouldn't bother about updating your splogs too much; although you should keep your money site fresh, I have found that you can generally just build out your splogs once, link spam them, then move onto the next batch of splogs. That cures your splog management headache.

But with 10-20 blogs I could use my own hosting so no more worrying about deletion.
The time I spend on creating 1000 crappy blogs/properties I could spend on making that 20 blogs stronger.

I guess what I'm asking is can fewer strong self hosted blogs be as good as 1000 (diverse but crappy) web 2 properties

zeano said:

But with 10-20 blogs I could use my own hosting so no more worrying about deletion.
The time I spend on creating 1000 crappy blogs/properties I could spend on making that 20 blogs stronger.

I guess what I'm asking is can fewer strong self hosted blogs be as good as 1000 (diverse but crappy) web 2 properties

Click to expand...

The point with using 1000 web 2.0s is that you're leveraging the domain age / authority / existing link diversity of the web 2.0s. It's not just about the straight out PR you can aim at your own sites. With your own domains, you're starting from scratch re:trust / authority and your link wheels are much more identifiable.

The whole point of what people used to call "parasite hosting" is that you use the existing juice (domain age, trust, authority, however you want to define it) of the free host domain to springboard yourself into the serps.

The free hosted stuff is there - it's free - so use it!

But with 10-20 blogs I could use my own hosting so no more worrying about deletion. The time I spend on creating 1000 crappy blogs/properties I could spend on making that 20 blogs stronger.

Click to expand...

Right. The question I have is when do you hit the point of diminishing returns - on either a freeby site or stacking up your own blogs on one hosting account.

Let's say you create a blog on blogger.com and post a few articles. I can't see how all other backlinks you get from Blogger will be irrelevant, either from one of your splogs or somebody else's "legit" blog. Same goes for your own blogs hosted on one IP. At which point should you not bother building - 2? 10? 20? 50? 100?

Autumn said:

The free hosted stuff is there - it's free - so use it!

Click to expand...

I already use them - I've got 250 websites. I wonder maybe it's time to focus on making them stronger instead of building more...

@zeano: i used to think 1x page pr9 link would do much more than tons of crappy links, and i still think you'll get what you pay for- $1500 a month link (pr9 link) vs tons of crap links that cost 10c each.

but what's there not to try? when it comes to SEO, i'd rather overdo it (link building), than not trying it out knowing people taking advantage of cheap links and still ranking high.

Quality over quanity every time - unless you like to spend hours on end working on your backlink strategy.

I am new at backlinking, just started last week actually, but I already learned something valuable that I will share with you and everyone here on BHW. Get .gov and .edu links to your website(s). Google values these links becuase not eveyone can get .gov or .edu extensions, and therefore Internet marketers cannot (easily) manipulate them by creating websites just for linking back. I've already got a few .gov links. I do not know what kind of juice they provide since they are new. I would love to hear from other people on this subject too.

but what's there not to try? when it comes to SEO, i'd rather overdo it (link building), than not trying it out knowing people taking advantage of cheap links and still ranking high.

Click to expand...

I agree, also you have to build links consistently . A good well done website starts to be good (trafficwise) with good content and 5k links visible in yahoo explorer. YOU can rank with 50 -500 quality links for 1 keyword in exact match if you want to go for broad match make sure you build your link of.

Scott Every Good website should have some nice GOVs and edus and for sure many trusted .ORGs