Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Chapter 11: The Rich Get Richer: True in SEO, Social, and All Organic Marketing

By Rand Fishkin

Editor's Note: Launching a new brand in a competitive online marketplace can be extremely challenging for inbound marketers. This is true today, and it was true in 2010, when this blog post was penned. While some of the tactics may have changed, the basic principles for successfully edging out competitors remain the same.

Many years ago, one of the search marketing industry's first thought leaders, Mike Grehan, wrote the seminal piece Filthy Linking Rich (www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Oct04/RichLinking.html). Mike's point was well encapsulated in a few sentences:

The Mathew effect, when applied to networks, basically equates to well connected nodes being more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor.

In fact, it has been proposed that “the rich get richer” effect drives the evolution of real networks. If one node has twice as many links as another node, then it is precisely twice as likely to receive a new link.

For those in the field of SEO, social media, and all forms of organic marketing (content development, blogging, email list building, etc.), it probably comes as no surprise that this same principle applies to each of these activities. The email marketer with a giant email list has much greater leverage to add 100 new subscriptions through the power of their existing influence than their new competitor does. The website ...