Letter to a client about the awful search engine truth

Hey [well respected client name] -

I want to show you something interesting. I have to update my web marketing mantra to say links links links before I say content content content. I know incoming links are important. I know that aged, high quality, authoritative links are better than new, low quality, spammy links. But what I think I’ve been in denial about is that, for right now, links are beating content.

Google assigns page rank to everything it indexes. 0-10 where 0 is banned or not yet trusted and 10 is god status. Now check this out. This page has a page rank of 4

http://www.umdum.com/dir/46297.php

Even before Loren (page owner) added the princeton link the page had a PR of 4. I’ve got scores of highly relevant content on my site but I let my marketing go for 1.5 years and fell off the map, I only have a PR 3 and this page with no content has a 4.

So this was all coming on me like a sneeze yesterday when I wrote you the note with some good back linking tasks.

I KNOW google will fix this, the whole point is to index authoritative content, not well-respected white space. So content will be king, but I have to admit after discussing this with the site owner as well as a very well respected internet marketer that this is today’s realty, links trump content.