What are inbound links worth after Panda and Penguin, since a site ranks for the NATIONAL keyword "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS!?!?

[yvonneq]

ARE INBOUND LINKS TODAY ALMOST WORTHLESS??!!? After having been the KING of SEO, down to the toilet? Today I got a great sample from a fellow SEO professional showing a site, rockymountainfurniture.com rank for "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS FROM 3 DOMAINS and a domain trust of 14!!!! ON A NATIONAL, VALUABLE, HIGH QUERY VOLUME KEYWORD!! I was stunned, but is this the "NEW SEO WORLD" we live in, so we should skip spending hundreds of hours on link building? There are over 32 different types of inbound links but this is much MORE than a radical change, this is turning SEO as it was up-side-down.

Any input, thoughts, ideas?

[irvingw]

My first suggestion is to breathe and relax.

I don't see rockymountainfurniture.com ranking for "outdoor furniture" perhaps you are seeing personalized results?

The homepage is a parked page even. http://rockymountainfurniture.com/

[Mike.Goracke]

It looks like it is pulling some localized results for that. I am in Minneapolis, MN and do not see rockymountainfurniture.com in the first 50 results; however, when I change my location to Atlanta, GA (I looked at the location in your profile), I do see them on page one.

Mike

[yvonneq]

Thanks Mike for input on the GEO difference, but do you have any idea how a local company can rank, even locally, on that kind of BROAD term with ONLY 7 inbound links? Very strange. Thanks.

[Mike.Goracke]

That is very odd that it is ranking that high.

Using OpenSiteExplorer, it shows that rockymountainpatiofurniture.com only as 5 internal links. The other 2 links are blog comments.

I looked and on Google, RMPF has almost 3000 indexed pages and after a 48% scan using Screaming Frog, the homepage has over 5406 internal inlinks.

I can only assume we are not seeing all of the information related to this site. It appears to be pretty established and have a decent number of internal pages with unique content.

That probably doesn't help much... but it does give you a little bit more information.

Mike