I’m a newcomer to the blogosphere, and it seems like there is an endless amount to learn about blogging and search engine optimization (SEO). When learning about SEO, one of the first things a beginner hears is “Content is king.” Using that assumption, I try to write quality articles. However, since then, I’ve learned one important thing. Content may be important, but backlinks are even more important.

I have been blogging for three and a half months. In that time, I have added 39 blogs to my site. Common sense would dictate that more blogs would equal more traffic. However, this has not been my experience. After the initial gain in traffic from publishing a new blog, some of my blogs dwindle down to almost no traffic. Frustratingly, I keep fighting this trend to no avail.

Recently, in search of an explanation, I decided to see if all my blogs were indexed. One by one, I entered the urls into the Google search engine. To my dismay, I found out that only 20 out of 39 blogs are indexed or approximately 51%. Of the remaining blogs, the search engine results said no matching documents could be found. Even blogs indexed in the beginning were no longer indexed.

Out of curiosity, I decided to perform this same search on a more popular writer at Hubpages who has been there longer. Although this writer’s content is well-written and interesting, surprisingly, the results were much the same. Out of 51 blogs only 32 were indexed or approximately 63%.

For an explanation, I searched on the internet. One article called “The Madness of King Google” explained this phenomenon. Briefly, if your website has few or no links, there is a greater tendency for Google to drop your pages from their index.

Regardless of whether you write for the enjoyment, profit, or both, the amount of traffic you receive is important. No traffic means no one is visiting your website. Obviously, if no one is visiting your website, no one is reading your material either. Thus, in this situation, a blogsite ends up being little more than a bookmark for yourself.

I can’t speak for others, but it is frustrating to try to write quality content only to see it dropped from Google’s index with a subsequent drop in traffic. Apparently, if you want to share your material, backlinks are not only important from an SEO standpoint, but they are also important in keeping your webpages indexed. SEO experts say if you have quality content, backlinks will follow. However, this has not been my experience so far. Thus, it looks like if you want to keep your webpages indexed, you need to peddle your material for backlinks too. If this concerns you, you may want to check your webpages. Keep in mind, “Content may be king, but back links are aces!”