JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS

2017, VOL. 57, NO. 2, 148–159

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2016.1183447

Search Engine Optimization: Comparison of Link Building and Social Sharing

Sonya Zhanga and Neal Cabageb
a
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, USA; bProduct Managers Association of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The practice of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can significantly increase a website’s search rankings, Google Analytics; link
driving more traffic to the website, and thereby increasing revenue. Three primary SEO strategies are building; search engine
Content, Link Building, and Social Sharing. Our study compares the performance of three similar optimization; social sharing;
web analytics
content-rich websites; each uses a different SEO strategy – one focused on Content only, the second
uses Content and proactive Link Building, and the third uses Content and Social Media campaign
designed to elicit social mentions and social sharing. We use Google Analytics to collect, analyze, and
compare their site traffic, domain authority, search ranks, and ad revenue before and after SEO
implementation, over the course of 18 months. Our study suggests that link building and social
media both improve website traffic and revenue. Social media can be an effective method for quickly
building traffic (for events); however, link building provides better return on investment in the long run.

Introduction the constantly evolving search engine algorithms; therefore, SEO

is critical for the success of all online business.
From fashion blogs to online technology magazines, today’s
In the early days, SEO was a shortcut to gain more website
Web has never been so crowded with content-rich websites.
traffic. One could easily rank well following gray or black-hat SEO
As the cost and complexity of launching a website dropped
practices such as (1) stolen, duplicate, spun, thin or no content; (2)
significantly, many individuals and communities have created
keyword stuffing, cloaking, or spamming; (3) link farm, link spam,
their own websites/blogs and published a great amount of
purchased links, or link manipulation; and (4) light affiliate, top
content, hoping to make a profit from online advertisements
heavy ad sites. Today, these tactics have much less of an impact on
and affiliate marketing. However, many of these websites only
search rankings; in fact, as many have learned the hard way, sites
focus on content and design, while missing effective promo-
using them can be penalized or even banned/blocked from Google
tion of their content, thereby failing to monetize and sustain
search results [14]. While fundamental SEO tactics like on-page
in the long run. Websites are often discovered while prospec-
tag optimization and site structure continue to help search engines
tive visitors search for what they need on popular search
to discover and understand the content of a site, this is no longer
engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. As of September
sufficient to rise to the top of search results in a crowded search
2014, Google takes 67% of U.S. search market, followed by
landscape. Now search engines are also seeing user experience,
Microsoft Bing (19%), and Yahoo (10%) [4]. In this study we
responsive design, link profile and social presence as additional
discuss how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help these
quality signals to determine the search rankings of the website.
content-rich websites to improve their search ranking and
Academic researchers [6, 12, 13, 15], industry experts [3, 5],
traffic, thereby increasing revenue. In particular, we compare
and agencies [11, 14] have identified three primary SEO strategies:
two primary SEO strategies: Link Building and Social Sharing,
(1) Content, (2) Link building, and (3) Social sharing. Figure 1
in a multi-website experiment.
illustrates how these SEO strategies can be implemented to a
website, and how performance can be measured. In the following
Organic SEO text, we explain each strategy and provide examples, which then
leads to our research question of this study, which focuses on
There are two types of search results: organic (by search engine’s comparing link building with social-sharing strategy. In the
algorithm) and paid (by advertisement). The method of optimiz- “Results and analysis” section, we explain each metric, how we
ing a website to make it rank well in the organic search results is collected and analyzed the data in an experiment.
known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As the Web
becomes increasingly crowded, new websites naturally rank
lower on the search results, making it more and more difficult Content
for prospective clients and customers to discover them; whereas Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide [11] pro-
established websites’ relevancy can also be affected overnight by vides some best practices that both Google’s internal teams

CONTACT Sonya Zhang xszhang@cpp.edu Computer Information Systems Department, College of Business Administration, Cal Poly Pomona, 3801 West
Temple Avenue, Pomona, CA 91768, USA.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ucis.
© 2017 International Association for Computer Information Systems

Figure 1. SEO for website.
and external webmasters follow to improve their sites’ crawl-
ability and indexing. The very beginning of Google’s SEO
Starter Guide states, “Interesting sites will increase their
recognition on their own. Creating compelling and useful
content will likely influence your website more than any of
the other factors discussed here.” In other words, creating
high-quality content and awareness can inspire viral sharing
and natural linking. Unfortunately in reality, very little con-
tent ever naturally goes viral or garners popularity in today’s
highly competitive Internet market. Websites that rank well in
search results depend upon not only “compelling and useful”
content but also the right platform and delivery, and often a
little push in the right direction, helping the website to build
some momentum.
Both Google’s SEO Starter Guide [11] and Moz’s Beginner’s
Guide to SEO [14] covered a dozen common areas for webmasters
to optimize the platform and delivery of their content, including:
(1) Site structure: Using well-structured pages including
sections and categories, self-documenting semantic
URLs, well-selected internal linking and keywords,
and effective navigation can get a user to any page
of the site with fewer clicks, i.e., high click-through
rates (CTRs). Using standard HTML and XML site-
maps can further ensure that search engines quickly
and accurately account for all of the website’s
content.
(2) On-page SEO: Finding more precise and effective key-
words/search phrases through keyword research, and
using these keywords in title tag, headlines, alt attributes
of images, and through-out text can further signal rele-
vance and significance of content topics to the search
engines thereby help reinforce search rankings.
Search engines have recently started providing better tools to
help webmasters improve their search results. For example,
Google Webmaster Tools (1) allow webmasters to set geo-
graphic target, preferred domain, URL parameters, and crawl
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 149
rate so that Google can crawl the site more efficiently and
rank the site better; (2) provide diagnostic tools that inform
webmasters of malware or errors found while crawling their
site; (3) provide HTML suggestions such as meta description
issues, title tag issues, and non-indexable content issues; (4)
provide statistics with unique insight to SEOs in particular,
including keyword impressions, CTRs, top pages delivered in
search results, and linking statistics; (5) allow webmasters to
submit sitemaps, test robots.txt files, adjust sitelinks, and
submit change of address requests when the website is
moved from one domain to another. These on-page and site
structure tactics play a critical role in boosting the discover-
ability and accessibility of content, for human users and
search engines alike. Quality and useful content delivered
through well-designed site structure and on-page SEO is the
most fundamental and agreed upon SEO practice for websites
of all kinds [3, 5, 11, 14].
Link building
Google’s SEO Starter Guide [11] acclaims, “Link building is an
art. It’s almost always the most challenging part of an SEO’s job,
but also the one most critical to success.” What differentiated
Google in the early years from other search engines was its focus
on algorithmic use and analysis of inbound links (i.e., external
citations of a website or page, also called “backlinks”) to deter-
mine the relevancy of a website or page. Through links, Google
can analyze not only the popularity of a website or page based on
the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also
metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Similar to determining
the prominence of an academic journal by the number of cita-
tions they get in other quality journal articles, Google looks for
links from other quality sites (i.e., sites with high authorization
and/or popularity) to determine the significance of a website,
thus to influence ranking propensity in their search results.
Nowadays all search engines are doing this kind of relevancy
search. Therefore, websites with a variety of high-quality
inbound links can improve their relevancy to search terms/
150 S. ZHANG AND N. CABAGE
keywords, rank higher in the organic search results, and increase
traffic through organic search.
Link building often works the best with a holistic strategy
that incorporates all levels of link building, from low-value
discussion type links to high-value directory type links, as
building a vast and varied link profile brings the best Search
Engine Results Page (SERP) ranks [11, 14]. An SERP is a page
displayed by a search engine in response to a keyword search
query, which usually contains a listing of the search results;
each result includes a short description and a hyperlink to the
original website or page.
There are many ways to build effective links [3, 5, 11, 14]:
(1) Manual “Outreach” Link Building. Outreach links
can be manually built by e-mailing bloggers for
links, submitting sites to directories (e.g., DMOZ,
Yahoo Directory) and authoritative sites (e.g., .edu
and .gov domains), or paying for listings of any
kind. However, paid links are not encouraged as
search engines like Google now discount the influ-
ence of paid links in their organic search results; in
fact websites caught buying links or participating in
link schemes risk severe penalties/bans [14].
(2) Self-Created, Non-Editorial Link Building. This refers
to creating links to the primary website through
(external) blog comments, user profiles, guest book
signings, or forum signatures on other popular blogs
and websites. These links offer the lowest value, but
can still have an impact for some sites in aggregate. In
general though, search engines continue to devalue
most of these types of links, and penalize sites that
pursue these links aggressively [14].
(3) Editorial Link Building. This refers to creating rele-
vant and valuable content on other (external) popular
blogs or websites with a link back to the primary
(internal) website. There are a couple of ways to
build effective editorial links:
a. Guest posts: Volunteer to publish articles and blog posts in
popular and authoritative online magazines and writer’s
networks, such as Inc.com, BusinessInsider, Examiner,
EzineArticles, and gather.com, and provide links in the
content back to the primary website.
b. Link Wheels: Set up a series of micro blogs (such as in
WordPress, Blogger) with content that flow from one
website to another and eventually link them back to the
primary website [3].
Finally, link research should be performed periodically to
ensure the quality and effectiveness of the links built, includ-
ing the number of new incoming links, overall inbound/back-
link portfolio, quality and authority of the sites linked to the
primary website (i.e., avoid spammy links), ranking and traffic
change. Popular link analytic tools are Majestic SEO, Raven
SEO Tools, Screaming Frog, SEOmoz, and Wordtracker. For
example, Moz’s domain authority is often used in link
research to predict a domain’s ranking potential in the search
engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link
metrics.
Social sharing
Compared to traditional link building discussed in the last
section, social-sharing strategy focuses on the art of creating
interesting and viral content that attracts the attention of
potential customers and leveraging social media (human
approach) to build natural linking rather than manipulating
search engines (machine approach).
Search engines have recently started integrating public social
mentions and social sharing (e.g., Facebook Like or Share, Google
Plus +1 or Share, Twitter Favorite or Re-tweet, LinkedIn News
Feed Like or Share, Pinterest Like or Pin-it) in their SERP ranking
algorithms [3, 5]. In addition, both Google and Bing have indi-
cated that the relative authority of a user factors into how heavily
these social signals are weighted. In acknowledgment of the sig-
nificance of social sharing, Google has launched their own social
network Google Plus, and used the activity on this network to
influence Google search results. When a user is logged in to
Google and performs a search, it will prioritize links that have
been “liked” or “shared” by people within the user’s Google Plus
network. Similarly, Microsoft enhances its search algorithms
using Facebook’s social graph data.
On the other hand, social networks influence Google both
directly and indirectly. Social networking/media sites like
Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, and
LinkedIn are crawled like any others and profiles containing links
on these sites are a direct benefit to the recipient of those links.
Indirectly, the promotion of a brand or a story through Twitter or
Facebook also results in awareness and additional links by people
who see these details. This, in turn, benefits the search rankings of
the recipient. These effects are further weighted by the visibility or
influence of people involved; some have much more social reach
and effect than others [3]. Social sharing also goes well beyond
SEO—significant direct traffic, branding value, and exposure to
the target audience.
There are many ways to elicit viral social sharing:
(1) Link Bait. This involves creating share worthy con-
tent (e.g., articles, video, Infographics, apps) on the
primary (internal) websites, and then sharing the
content via links, images, or quote on (external)
social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, giving
credits to the content creator and the site where it
originated. To create a viral effect, it is critical to
create content that leverages aspects of usefulness,
information dissemination, or humor. So that users/
audience who see it will want to share it with friends,
websites, and social platforms. This high quality, edi-
torially earned votes are invaluable to building trust,
authority, and rankings potential [14].
(2) Social Presence. Most businesses have a Facebook page,
where they post consistent and fresh news feed about
the company or product. Some went further with
Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr pages, and
even apps. The critically acclaimed TV show Breaking
Bad created an outstanding Facebook app that

transformed a person’s name with element icons like
the iconic logo, and allowed people to set it as their
Facebook profile photo. The app was a huge success
garnering over 4.1 million impressions and was used by
over 800,000 people.
(3) Incentivized Social Sharing. Many consumer-based busi-
nesses promote their products and websites with incen-
tivized social-sharing campaigns. To celebrate its 30th
anniversary, Kenneth Cole created a dynamic social hub,
which aggregated social content from Twitter, Instagram,
and Vine using the #30yrsbold hashtag. To encourage
customer participation and sharing, they offered a hash-
tag sweepstakes where fans could win a $500 gift card as
well as a customized prize like a street-style photo shoot
or a night out in NYC with a special gallery tour. The
campaign revived its website and created social impact
across multiple platforms.
Finally, social analysis should be performed regularly to dis-
cover what consumers are saying about the brand, the website
content, and the competitors. Popular social analytic tools
such as SalesForce’s Social Studio [16] help businesses to
understand and use the most interesting topics and influential
conversations to inform future marketing decisions.
Relevant SEO studies
While searching the keyword “SEO” and “Search Engine
Optimization” returns thousands of book results on Amazon
and tens of millions websites on Google, which shows vast
interest in the subject, only a few SEO studies were published
in recent academic journals and conference proceedings, and
most were limited to: (1) the algorithm criteria, effectiveness
and robustness of search engines [7, 9]; (2) the comparison
between SEO and paid search marketing/advertising [2, 6, 10];
(3) the overview [12, 15]; or (4) the economic model [17, 18]
of SEO with no or little empirical evidence.
Malaga [13] found that SEO is an effective method for improv-
ing search engine rankings and site traffic. In addition, the costs
and benefits of the SEO project proved more cost-effective than
the pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing campaign. However
Malaga’s study used only one eCommerce/retail website – SEO
and PPC were applied in phases to the same website and data were
collected for 6 months after. Without comparing to any control
group it cannot be asserted that the ranking and traffic increase
were due to the SEO efforts. In addition, the website in the study
sold iPod accessories, which was a very competitive market, hence
may have skewed the conclusions away from PPC advertising.
Ghose and Yang [7] suggested that while the conversion rates,
order values, and profits from paid search advertisements were
much higher than those from natural search, organic search
seemed to perform better at the specific keyword-level.
However, Ghose and Yang’s data are also limited – from a single
eCommerce/retail website. Evans [6] recognizes the importance of
inbound links as well as directories such as DMOZ and social
bookmarking sites to rank highly in Google. However, Evans’
study analyzed only the top 50 websites returned for one very
specific and uncommon query/keyword. Agarwal et al. [1],
Malaga [12], and O’Neill and Curran [15] provided overviews of
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 151
SEO strategies and pitfalls, including black hat, gray hat, and white
hat on page (page title, meta tags, and URLs) and off page SEO
(linking, content, and keyword research). Xing and Lin [19]
proposed an analytical model for the sustainability of SEO firms
and the impact of SEO on search engine/online advertising indus-
try profit. However all these studies [1, 12, 15, 18] were not
empirical, did not measure or compare the effectiveness of each
specific technique/strategy, and did not include the most recently
emerged social-sharing strategy. The limited number of academic
studies in SEO may result from researchers lacking ability to build
or access to the backend data of multiple, comparable, and live
websites that can reach substantial site traffic and decent ranking,
as well as other resources (time, money, expertise, etc.) needed for
experiments.
Research question and methodology
As discussed earlier, content is the most fundamental and
agreed upon SEO practice; however the effectiveness of Link
Building and Social Sharing is not as obvious. Our study
intends to answer an interesting and valuable research ques-
tion that has not been resolved or examined by any previous
SEO study: which is a more effective SEO strategy for con-
tent-rich websites—Link building or Social sharing?
Assuming a content-rich website owner spends the same
amount of time and resources in SEO that had similar
content, site structure, on-page SEO, organic traffic, author-
ity, search ranking, and ad revenue at the beginning, during
the same period of time (in order to eliminate the factor that
search engines alter their algorithms), we proposed following
explorative hypotheses:
H1: Both link building and social sharing are effective SEO
strategies. In other words, the websites that use link building
or social sharing will realize greater increases in traffic and
revenue, and higher domain authority and SERP rank, than
those that did not use any.
H2: The social-sharing effects are realized more quickly than
the link-building effects. In other words, the websites that use
social sharing will increase traffic and revenue more immedi-
ately than those using link building.
H3: The link-building effects are longer lasting than the
social-sharing effects. In other words, the websites that use
link building will realize higher traffic and revenue than those
using social sharing, for a sustained period of time (the 18
months of this study).
H4: Link building is more effective than social sharing. In
other words, websites that use link building realize greater
increases in traffic and revenue, and higher domain authority
and SERP rank, than those using social sharing.
In order to test the hypotheses, we selected a group of three
content-rich websites for the study: Site A, Site B, and Site C
(alias of the websites are used throughout this article to
protect commercial confidentiality):
152 S. ZHANG AND N. CABAGE
● Each website is standalone and has a unique domain
name and URL—an improvement reducing noises com-
pared to other previous SEO studies that used subdo-
mains or subdirectories of the same website, such as
Malaga’s [13] study in 2007.
● All three websites have similar quantity of content
including text, multimedia, and ad units (1000+ pages
each website, 500+ words each page).
● All three websites use similar quality and useful content to
drive traffic thereby generating ad revenue—Each site pre-
sents information about a city on hundreds of web pages,
and in six categories: Neighborhoods, Entertainment
Events, Professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.),
Restaurants, Hotels, and Factorials.
● The three cities featured are medium U.S. cities similar
in geography size, population, culture, and tourist
attractiveness.
● All three websites have similar target audience groups—
people who plan to travel or relocate or have recently
relocated to that city, as well as current residents.
● All three websites are built at the same time (September–
October 2010), used the same SEO-friendly WordPress fra-
mework for site structure and on-page SEO, and had similar
traffic, domain authority, and the number of links at the
beginning of our study (details in “Results and analysis”
section). In particular, all three websites were optimized
following best on-page SEO practices suggested by Google
[11] and Moz [14], considering audience, competitors, key-
words selection and display, and content writers (matched
Figure 2. Site A (link building) home page.
with Killoran’s [8] study in 2013 on key SEO lessons for
professional communicators).
● All three websites make revenue through Google AdSense
and affiliates (local.com and hotels.com), and had simi-
lar ad placement, traffic, domain authority, the number
of links, and ad revenue at the beginning of our study.
Figures 2–4 show the screenshots of the websites’ home pages
(screenshots partly blurred to protect commercial confidenti-
ality). During October–November 2011, link building was
implemented to Site A and social sharing to Site B, while
Site C was used as a control group (i.e., content only, no
link, or social SEO implemented). Table 1 shows SEO strate-
gies, actions, and expense incurred for the three websites.
Results and analysis
Four Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) suggested by Google
[11] and Moz [14] were used to measure site performance
before and after SEO implementation: traffic, domain author-
ity, SERP rank, and revenue (indirect). Each KPI and their
results are discussed in the following sections.
Site traffic
Google Analytics (GA) was used to collect and analyze the site
traffic data of all three websites before and after SEO for 18
months (August 2011–January 2013). No paid advertising was

Figure 3. Site B (social sharing) home page.
used to any of the websites, so the site traffic was either (1) Search
Engine Organic (visitors referred by an unpaid search engine
listing, e.g., Google.com), (2) Referral (visitors referred by other
websites, e.g., Facebook.com), or (3) Direct—visitors who visited
the site by typing the URL directly into their browser. “Direct” can
also refer to the visitors who clicked on the links from their
bookmarks/favorites, untagged links within e-mails, or links
from documents that do not include tracking variables (such as
PDFs or Word documents). SEO focuses on obtaining a natural
placement on organic SERPs and bringing in organic traffic.
Table 2 shows a breakdown of total site traffic for all three
websites over 18 months. Note that GA uses “session” to
measure traffic. A session is a period of time (default 30
min) a user is actively engaged with the website, app, etc.
All usage data (Screen Views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) are
associated with a session. All three websites began with a
similar amount of traffic. Site A gained the most total traffic
(10,553) as well as most search engine organic traffic among
all three (8,523); Site B was the second in total traffic and
gained the most significant referral traffic (3,262). The traffic
results were consistent with the SEO implementation – Site A
implemented Link Building and gained most of its traffic
(80% of total traffic) from search engines/organic traffic, and
its top sources/medium is Google; Site B implemented Social
Sharing and gained a significant part of traffic (35% of total
traffic) from social referrals, and its top sources/medium is
StumbleUpon.com—one of the top social media traffic gen-
erators in the United States, attracting over 25 million regis-
tered users.
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 153
Figure 5 compares the monthly search engine organic
traffic of the three websites over 18 months. All three
websites started at about the same level, arrived at its high-
est organic traffic volume 8 months after SEO implementa-
tion before taking a steep decline, most likely due to the
Google Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
updated on August 10, 2012, which affected most content-
rich websites online, and then followed by a gradual recov-
ery for Site A (link building) and Site B (social sharing);
however Site C (control) never recovered from that point.
For the data sets in Figure 5, t-test results also show that
the three websites are significantly different in organic
traffic.
Figure 6 shows that Site A (link building) gained the most
organic traffic over time, Site B (social sharing) gained less
than half of Site A’s organic traffic, and Site C (control) was
the least.
Figure 7 compares the monthly total traffic of the three
websites over 18 months: all three websites started at about
the same traffic (ANOVA tests find no significant difference);
Sites A and B had grown significantly over time while Site C
remained at the same level. Noticeably Site B had a significant
spike during November–December 2011, right after social
sharing was implemented to the website. This traffic increase
was mostly created by social website referral traffic (not search
engines/organic traffic) during a short period of time
(November 16–20, 2011). GA Traffic source/medium and
traffic referrals show detailed activities of these five days
(Table 3).
154 S. ZHANG AND N. CABAGE

Figure 4. Site C (Control) home page.

Table 1. SEO implemented (Timeline: October–November 2011).

SEO
Site strategy SEO actions Type Expense
Site A Link Link requests to other bloggers Manual outreach $2,500 paid for research, writers, SEO agency, and paid
Building Directories submission Manual outreach directories
Comments, reviews with signature and Self-created, Non
primary editorial
site link on other blogs, forums, and
websites
Guest posts on other blogs and websites Editorial
with
author bio and primary site link
Link wheels Editorial
Link Research, Keyword research Audit
Site B Social Articles on social news websites Link bait $2,500 paid for research, writers, SEO agency, and
Sharing (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc.) contest prizes
Infographics on social media Link bait
Account, content, and engagement on Social presence
social networks (Facebook, Twitter,
Tumblr etc.)
Incentivized social sharing contest Incentivized social
sharing
Social analysis Audit
Site C -Control None None None $0

A total of 1917 visits during these five days were from
StumbleUpon.com. GA Site Content shows that the most
viewed page during these five days was a blog article pub-
lished on November 16, 2011, about a unique event in that
city (2,025 total page views, 65% of the total page views during
these five days). The article went viral mostly due to that an
active member of the StumbleUpon community added this
blog page to StumbleUpon’s index of high-quality, human-
curated content, which was viewed and shared by thousands
of StumbleUpon’s frequent users. The same blog article also
received the most Facebook likes and Twitter tweets during
these days among all blog articles on Site B. Traffic reached
highest on the day the article was published (960 on
November 16), calmed down in the following two days, and
then went high again on Saturday (916 on November 19).
Traffic came down quickly after the weekend (266 visits on
Monday, November 21), and remained steady 10% growth for
the rest of the year. The blog articles were part of the planned
 JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 155

Table 2. Site traffic breakdown analysis: August 2011–January 2013.

% of
Type of # of total Top # of sessions of
Website traffic sessions traffic source/medium top source
Site A Organic 8,523 80.8% Google/organic 7,565 (88.8% of
organic traffic)
Referral 562 5.3% Google/referral 242
Content + Direct 1,468 13.9%
Link Total 10,553 100.0%
Building Traffic
Site B Organic 3,758 40.7% Google/organic 3,455
Content + Referral 3,262 35.3% StumbleUpon. 2,290 (70.2% of
Social com/referral referral traffic)
Sharing Direct 2,218 24.0%
Total 9,238 100.0% Figure 7. Total site traffic: August 2011–January 2013.
Traffic
Site C Organic 2,121 73.7% Google/organic 1,720 (81.1%)
Referral 199 6.9% Google/referral 101
Content Direct 559 19.4%
Only Total 2,879 100.0% Table 3. Site B traffic breakdown analysis: November 16–20, 2011.
(Control) Traffic Total daily
Date Social (# of sessions) Direct Organic site traffic
Nov 16, 712 (74% of daily site traffic, 241 7 960
2011 including 705 from
Wednesday StumbleUpon)
social-sharing strategy and at least one became viral, created Nov 17, 150 (57% of daily site traffic, 110 4 264
the momentum of the referral traffic spike, and gradually 2011 including 145 from
Thursday StumbleUpon)
helped building up links and organic traffic thereafter. Nov 18, 166 (58% of daily site traffic, 119 0 285
Figure 8 compares the total site traffic of the three 2011 including 163 from
websites over the course of 18 months: Site A (link build- Friday StumbleUpon)
Nov 19, 673 (73% of daily site traffic, 238 5 916
ing) generated 46% of the overall traffic, Site B (social 2011 including 665 from
sharing) generated 41%, and Site C (control) generated Saturday StumbleUpon)
13%. There were 9,238 total unique visits to Site B from Nov 20, 243 (66% of daily site traffic, 124 0 367
2011 including 239 from
August 1, 2011, to January 30, 2013, among which 3,565 Sunday StumbleUpon)
Total 5 days 1944 (70% of total daily site 832 16 2792
traffic, 1917 from StumbleUpon)

(38%) were via social referral, including 2,290 (64% of total

social referral) from StumbleUpon, 365 (10% of total social
referral) from Facebook, and 36 (1% of total social referral)
from Twitter. In comparison, there were 10,553 total
unique visits to Site A during the same period of time,
among which only 83 visits (0.7%) were via social referral,
and 8,472 visits (80%) were search engine (Google, Bing,
Yahoo, etc.) organic. These numbers confirmed the traffic
effects of link-building and social-sharing SEO.
Figure 5. Search engine organic traffic: August 2011–January 2013.

Figure 6. Total search engine organic site traffic.

156 S. ZHANG AND N. CABAGE
Figure 8. Total site traffic.
Domain authority and link research
The change of domain authority and links was monitored
for all three sites using Open Site Explorer (OSE), a link
research tool provided by Moz, a well-known American
Internet marketing software company. OSE is powered by
Mozscape, which is Moz’s index of the links on the
Internet. Beyond the standard link data, such as linking
URLs, linking domains, and anchor text, Mozscape
includes unique metrics that provide insight into the
authority and trust of pages and domains. Major search
engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) built similar indexes to
help evaluate the importance and relevance of content on
the web. OSE provides the following metrics:
(1) Domain metrics
● Domain authority—predicts this domain’s ranking
potential in the search engines based on an algorith-
mic combination of all link metrics. Root domains
(e.g., TripAdviser.com), without the sub-domain or
sub-directory, are used.
(2) Page metrics
● Page authority—predicts this page’s ranking poten-
tial in the search engines based on an algorithmic
combination of all link metrics.
● Linking root domains—Number of unique root
domains containing at least one linking page to this
URL.
● Total links—All links to this page including inter-
nal, external, followed, and no-followed.
OSE metrics scores relevantly reflect the authority and trust of
the website, and mostly correlate with the website’s traffic and
SERP rank. Since OSE updated its data every 4 weeks, the
domain authorities of the websites were collected monthly
over the course of 18 months. Figure 9 shows that all three
websites started at about the same domain authority (12/100),
and all of them had significantly and gradually improved their
domain authority since October–November 2011, during
which the link building and social sharing were implemented
to the websites. All three website had a big upward spike
during April/May 2012, which is likely due to the Google
Penguin update on April 24, 2012. Penguin update favored
websites that follow Google’s publishers guidelines, while
punished those spammed its search results using paid link
Figure 9. OSE domain authority.
or link network. Similarly, Google DMCA update (August 10,
2012) and other minor Panda and Penguin updates timeline
coordinated with domain authority ranking increases (small
spikes). Among the three websites, Site A gained the steepest
increase (158%) in domain authority (31/100), Site C gained
the most modest increase (75%, 21/100), and Site B sat in the
middle (136%, 26/100). Even though no link or social SEO
was implemented to Site C, it is common for quality new
websites to gain domain authority over time. For the data sets
in Figure 9, t-test results also show that the three websites are
significantly different in domain authority. The domain
authority trends shown in Table 4 and Figure 9 are overall
consistent with site traffic trends in Figures 7 and 8.
Table 5 shows the trends of inbound links, including linking
root domains and total links, of all three websites before and after
the SEO implementation. Site A (link building) achieved the
highest number of both linking root domains and total links—
26 unique websites provided link to Site A, which generated a total
of 598 (average 23 links per site) links to Site A by the end of the
experiment in January 2013. In comparison, Site B and Site C also
grew their links over time. Site C (social sharing) obtained 9 more
linking root domains, most of which were social sites including
Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, and addi-
tional 199 links, most of which were from the blog article shared
on StumbleUpon, as discussed in Site Traffic.
SERP ranking
Google AdWords Keyword Planner was used to perform keyword
research that finds the primary keywords that have more potential
to attract traffic to each of the three websites. Google AdWords
Keyword Planner is one of the most popular tools in the industry
to get keyword ideas and traffic forecasts not only for paid
advertising campaigns but also for SEO purpose. It helps to
identify a keyword’s growing (or shrinking) popularity, filter out
low-volume searches, and create hundreds of long-tail keyword
combinations that target specific product or service (in our case,
content as a product) and landing page, while avoiding high-
competitive head keywords.
These target primary keywords were then applied to the
WordPress framework (e.g., in title, meta description, and
content) that was used by all three websites to improve their
on-page SEO. Google Analytics was then used to identify the
 JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 157

Table 4. Domain authority before and after August 2011–January 2013.

Domain Domain
authority Domain authority
Website SEO strategy before authority after increase
Site A Content + link 12 31 +158%
building
Site B Content + 11 26 +136%
social sharing
Site C Content only 12 21 +75%
(Control)

Table 5. Links before and after August 2011–January 2013.

Linking Linking Linking
root root root Total Total Total Figure 10. Keywords and Google SERP ranks.
SEO domains domains domains links links links
Website strategy before after increase before after increase
Site A Content 2 26 1,200% 10 598 5,880%
+ link traffic from social referrals. For the data sets in Figure 11, t-test
building results also show that the three websites are significantly differ-
Site B Content 2 11 450% 10 209 1,990% ent in ad revenue. Figure 12 compares the total ad revenue
+ social
sharing gained from the three websites over the course of 18 months:
Site C Content 3 5 67% 13 37 185% Site A (link building) generated 54% of the overall ad revenue,
only Site B (social sharing) generated 32%, and Site C (control)
(Control)
generated 13%.

top performed primary keywords, which usually matched

Hypotheses results
with the target primary keywords. Then Google SERP ranks
were then tracked using these top performed primary key- Table 6 shows the hypotheses results.
words manually or using third party tools. Figure 10 com-
pares the average Google SERP ranks of the three websites
Discussion
using their top performed primary keywords over 18 months.
All three websites improved their Google SERP ranks, ranging We selected three websites that had similar content, site struc-
from the most modest 38% for “(city C) wedding guide” (No. ture, page structure, organic traffic, domain authority, number
71 in July 2012) to highest 540% for “(city A) area guide” (No. of links, SERP rank, and revenue at the beginning, and applied
5). For the data sets in Figure 10, t-test results also show that different SEO strategies to each one of them (content + link
the three websites are significantly different in SERP ranks. building, content + social sharing, and content only for control
purpose) with the same amount of expense and in the same
timeline. We tracked and analyzed their site traffic, domain
Revenue authority, SERP rank, and ad revenue over the course of 18
Like most content-rich websites, the commercial value and goal of months. The results show that the website that applied link
all three websites in our study were to make revenue through building generated the most substantial traffic, domain author-
advertising (i.e., Google AdSense) and affiliate marketing (e.g., ity, SERP rank, and ad revenue increases, and such increases
hotel booking). As the biggest online ad network, Google AdSense occurred gradually and exponentially after the links were built.
helps website publishers to achieve the advertising revenue goal by The website that applied social sharing generated the quickest
displaying targeted Google ads and leveraging the proprietary traffic and ad revenue increase during the short period of time
Google search and page-ranking technologies. Figure 11 com- that the social-sharing SEO was implemented; however most of
pares Google AdSense revenue before and after SEO across the such increase slowed down almost immediately. The control
three websites. The specific amount of ad revenue is omitted to website with only content SEO and without a link or social SEO
protect commercial confidentiality. The ad revenue graph displays
a similar pattern as site traffic shown in Figure 7 and domain
authority in Figure 9. All three sites began with similar revenue
(ANOVA tests find no significant difference). The revenue of
Site C (control) stayed stable. Site B experienced a quick upward
spike in revenue during the short period of time the social-
sharing SEO was implemented, and dove quickly and far behind
Site A over time. Whereas Site A (link building) experienced
more frequent spikes and continued to grow to the highest
revenue, long after the links were built. Interestingly, with only
14% more traffic, Site A was able to realize 69% more in revenue
compared to Site B, suggesting that traffic coming from out-
bound links is of better quality or higher conversion rate than Figure 11. Ad revenue.
158 S. ZHANG AND N. CABAGE

Figure 12. Total ad revenue.

applied also grew in traffic, domain authority, SERP rank, and
ad revenue but most moderately among three websites. During
the period of data collection (August 2011–January 2013)
Google has rolled out 40+ minor to major updates of their
search engine algorithm. All three websites had a domain
authority upward spike during April/May 2012, which is likely
due to a major Google Penguin update (April 24, 2012).
Overall, the traffic of all three websites grew continuously
throughout the Google updates, suggesting that the websites
were developed with sustaining white hat SEO strategies, tech-
niques, and tactics.
Implications for practice
For Internet startups, site traffic is critical to their business
success or failure. Many have spent a great amount of their
financial resources on paid advertisement to attract targeted
traffic. Depending on the competition for the keywords they
are bidding on, they may not make enough to cover the ad
cost. Compared to paid advertisement, organic SEO takes
longer time to show effectiveness; however, it costs much
less and can have a long-term effect if well executed. While
most research studies, white papers, and online articles talked
about the primary SEO strategies (content, link building, and
social sharing), few studied which one(s) are more effective.
The answer depends on many variables such as how the SEO
is executed, the size of sources, and the type(s) of the websites.
Our study suggests that websites should attempt to build a
diverse SEO profile that includes all; and when the resources
(e.g., time and money) are limited, focus more on link build-
ing and less on social sharing, as link building is more likely
to generate high-quality traffic and create long-term positive
effects with the same amount of efforts and resources.
Implications for academia
Although algorithms of search engines remain business
secrets, academic researchers worldwide continue to
experiment, observe, and triangulate, hoping to find the
criteria search engines may use, the quality and cost of
organic and sponsored search results, and the effective
SEO and search marketing strategies for online businesses
to increase traffic and revenue. Common limitations in
previous SEO studies have been using single-website
data, low traffic/search ranking, and limited KPIs. These
limitations may have affected the quality (reliability and
generalizability) and quantity of empirical evidence in
order to find valuable results. Our study overcame such
limitations by setting up a group of three comparable
(similar content, site structure, traffic, ranks and revenue
to begin with) live websites, applying different SEO stra-
tegies to each, collecting and analyzing their KPI data over
the course of 18 months. The results answered an inter-
esting research question, whether link building or social
sharing is a more effective SEO strategy for content-rich
websites, which had not been investigated or resolved in
any previous academic SEO study.
Limitation
One limitation of our study is using only three websites, and
each applied a different SEO strategy (control only, content +

Table 6. Hypotheses results.

Hypotheses KPI results Supported?
H1: Both link building or social sharing are effective Site A (Link) increased 267% more in total site traffic, 304% more in revenue, 63% higher in Yes
SEO strategies. domain authority, and 46% higher in SERP rank than Site C (Control).
Site B (Social) increased 221% more in total site traffic, 138% more in revenue, 37% higher in
domain authority, and 18% higher in SERP rank than Site C (Control).
H2: The effects generated from social sharing occur Site B (Social) increased 503% more traffic and 628% revenue than Site A (Link) in the first Yes
quicker than the ones from link building. two months after SEO implemented, and such increase quickly diminished in following month
(−12% in traffic and −44% in revenue than Site A).
H3: The effects generated from link building last Site A (Link) increased 14% more in traffic and 69% more in revenue than Site B (Social) over Yes
longer than the ones from social sharing. 18 months.
H4: Link building is more effective than social Site A (Link) increased 14% more in total site traffic, 69% more in revenue, 19% higher in Yes
sharing. domain authority, and 34% higher in SERP rank than Site B (Social).

link building, or content + social sharing). Another limitation
is that all three websites have a local appeal because the
content is geographically based. In such case variables related
to location (i.e., differences in demographics in these geogra-
phically localized markets) might influence the results.
Future research can attempt to overcome such limitations,
and test the same hypothesis using more websites involving a
larger variety of business models (eCommerce, SaaS, etc.).
However, researchers must be aware that it takes time, money,
expertise, and other resources to build or gain access to the
backend data of a large group of comparable websites, apply
various SEO strategies, collect and analyze the data, for this kind
of studies. The websites cannot be simply mock websites or
student projects because as discussed throughout this article,
the websites must reach substantial site traffic and decent search
rank within the top 100 search results for reasonable keywords in
order to generate valuable data. Our study focuses on content-
rich websites that profit from ads and affiliate sales. It would be
interesting to conduct a similar study to different type(s) of
websites such as eCommerce and SaaS in future.
Conclusion
Good SEO practice can increase a website’s natural search engine
ranking, and drive more traffic to a website—more traffic means
more potential revenue from advertisement and/or affiliate for
content-rich websites. This study looked at the efficacy of proac-
tive link building and social media promotion, compared to
creating a content-rich website alone. We found that the website
that implemented the link-building strategy generated the highest
traffic, search rankings, domain authority, and ad revenue. And
the website that implemented social-sharing strategy realized a
quick but temporary burst of traffic that slowed down shortly after
the sharing activities. Both outperformed the control website that
focused only on Content. Our study suggests link building to be
more effective in long term. With the same time and budget, link
building generated higher traffic, higher SERP rank, and domain
authority. These positive results subsequently lead to an increase
in ad revenue. These increases occur steadily over time. Social
sharing also had a positive effect by creating a quick temporary
burst of traffic that slows down shortly after the sharing activities.
Ideally, websites should employ a combination of all three of
the techniques studied here. Rich content provides a solid base for
natural linking and social sharing. Promoting that content
through proactive link building and social media campaigns will
help that content to find an audience that otherwise may never
discover it, and jumpstart to a fortuitous cycle of natural linking
and social sharing, if the content is good and it connects with the
audience. In this way, all three approaches can be complimentary,
and should be part of a holistic online content marketing strategy.
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INFORMATION SYSTEMS 159
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