Just about anybody that is even familiar with the SEO can tell you that in today’s search engine rankings, backlinks are critical. One of the most common mistakes that I see when webmasters work to build backlinks is that they will often spend all their time building thousands of links on any website that will give them out when they may benefit more from just a few high-quality links instead. It is important to make sure you are not just building the total number of links to your site, but that the links are coming from as many different domains as possible.
Which websites have proven to be the best at getting backlinks? SEOmoz just recently updated its list of the 500 top domains based on the number of linking root domains. These are the web’s champion link-builders and many of the top sites are names you would expect to see including Google, Wikipedia, and Youtube. Of course there are also some highly ranked domains that you might not have expected.
While looking through the top 500 domains proved interesting, taking a look at the trends displayed in SEOmoz’s latest update was really cool to see. Not surprisingly, social media sites saw big gains including Twitter, Ning, and Yelp. Sites that saw some of the largest drops in the rankings included many .edu websites and the cooling Bebo.com. One site I was very happy to see fall was DMOZ which dropped another 10 spots to #114. I have been very disappointed with the path that DMOZ has taken as the quality of its directory has really gone downhill. I would expect to see it continue to fall when the next rankings are released also.
You can find the updated domain rankings and some more interesting trends at SEOmoz.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting list, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was hoping that at least one personal website or blog would have been on the list. I guess that was a bit much to hope for. We can’t count the Huffington Post, the only blog on the list, since in reality it’s a news source with multiple writers and participants.
Mitch’s last blog post..Top Three Do’s And Don’ts
I agree that it would be great to see. Maybe we’ll see one eventually. I think that by the time a website is getting enough attention to make the top 500 list, the owner will bring others in to grow the site and make more money. It would take a real purist to keep the site as a personal site at that point I would think.