Do you have some kind of stats package? How often does that search string generate a visit?
The real point of this though is that this is not evidence that links aren’t as important as they have been historically. This particular page ranks without links because the competition is so weak.
You will never rank for a competitive phrase without links - unless - you have a seriously Authoritative site, such that Google will rank a new page from that site based entirely on the site’s own reputation, even though the page itself is without it’s own links. That’s the only exception that I’m aware of and it’s not that common to see it.
Of couse not, and I never said it would in the real world. But there is a difference between NEVER ranking and conditional ranking.
Your earlier statement no links = no traffic is categorically wrong. It is perfectly possible to run a profitable business from 100% longtailing without a single link.
Good content + low competion = high ranking + high quality traffic, even if it is in low numbers for each keyword.
From a business management point of view, it is clearly a good roi to add links to a longtailing site and double the profit with a small investment, but that is a totally different story.
Yes it is categorically wrong, if you take it literally. There are too many factors to easily say it in only a few words so I generalised.
In the context of ranking for competitive phrases though, it’s correct. Without links you’ll most likely languish on the third or fourth page and no one will ever see your page that way. It also has no bearing on any other form of generating traffic to your site and doesn’t have anything to do with pages like the one you linked which rank well for search phrases that might get a couple of clicks a month if you’re lucky, without needing links.
So really what this comes down to is what was meant by the word ‘good’ in the thread title. If it means being number one then yes, you can do that without links. If it meant ranking well for a competitive phrase that gets a lot of clicks and will be a big money earner, then no you can’t. My definition of a ‘good’ ranking is the latter.
It really depends on what you call a backlink… a link for a search engine is not a backlink, in my opinion. But if you have no competition it may bring some traffic and depending on what you do it may be good enough to have a surviving business… The any other way that I can think of is using PPC campaigns. If you do it right, you can make profit even if you have to spend some cash to bring the traffic to your landing pages.
No doubt that you need links, and speficically high quality links, to compete on high volume keywords. But high volume keywords have at least one distinct downside ( apart from heavy competition ) unless you offer something unique e.g. the lowest price ever, anywhere or exclusive rights for product x. High volume keyword have a low call:hit ratio, whereas longtail has an inherently better ratio.
“Good” seo, is in the eye of the beholder. I have purposely avoided getting involved with a dozen or so ( if not more ) high volume keywords on my site because I didn’t want the hassle of loads of boring calls wasting my time on high hassle/low profit enquiries. I copied they idea of a longtailing low budget website from my ex. She set up a one-man-band property development business during the height of the property boom. With few links and even fewer quality links, her site ranks first out of 100,000,000+ returns. Loads and loads of specific, keyword rich unique content is the only reason I can see why her site ranks so well; even her on page seo is absolute s h y t e!
Fair enough but I’m only worried about how the search engines value my links and how that’s going to result in generating revenue either directly for me or for a client.
What you do with the traffic you create is a seperate discussion and probably not one for the SEO forum, that should happen in the marketing section.
I can’t agree with that and neither would my clients. I could go out and get 20 #1 rankings for a client, practically overnight, charge them £1000 and fail to mention that they won’t make any money from those rankings because no one is searching using those phrases. I doubt they’d agree that those are ‘good’ rankings.
So we necessarily have to determine a value for SEO and it makes sense to do that using revenue generated as the measure of success. Therefore a ‘good’ ranking generates revenue and the more revenue generated, the better the ranking. IMO. So a ranking that generates 2 clicks a month isn’t a good ranking even though 50 of those types of ranking might generate an income you can live off.
Frankly, I’d rather have 50 ‘low hanging fruit’ rankings than one really good ranking, that way all my eggs aren’t in one basket but this discussion is about whether you can get a good ranking without links and I don’t think you can.
If you are working as an seo-pro, you probably deal for the majority of the time with people that know virtually nothing about webdesign, seo or e-marketing. For those, you would of course have to increase the traffic on their existing main keywords to make them happy.
However, my ex started off from the opposite direction and opted for a low budget long tail approach as the business model. The really interesting part there is, that she now gets topranking for mainstream key words as well, still without many backlinks. Don’t ask me how, I have no idea. But I do know that it is a very low budget website and very little time and/or money was spent on backlinks.
What do mean exactly by “without links”?
“As long as you have some links it will work”, or
"You need loads of links including a fair number of highquallity i.e. pr5 and up.
Look, all I’m saying is that links are less important than they once were. I’m not saying they’re not important at all. I’m not saying they’re necessarily less important than other signals. I’m simply saying that, whatever weight they received six months ago is higher than whatever weight they receive today.
I admit I haven’t given any evidence for this. I’ve read it in several places, but can’t off-hand find the sources again. If I come across a good reference, I will post it here. Otherwise, for goodness sake let’s consider this part of the discussion closed.
If you can, that would be great. For now, let’s assume that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, or even a reasonable theory as to why they would have changed, links are still as important as they ever were.
Since Eric Schmidt talked about ‘branding’, and in the new era of social media, I can imagine simple mentionms of your brand growing in strength as a signal but I don’t see how that could replace a link as a strong signal of the usefulness of your resource to other people.
As Google know better than anyone else that 99% of backlinks are arteficially generated, and as such are NOT recommendations, it stands to reason that we will see an increasing shift in weight from links to social media mentioning and the +1 button.
Don’t agree. First of all, the 99% figure is just not true is it, I’m not even going to ask you to link evidence because there isn’t any.
Secondly, +1 and social media are even easier to skew than links and so they’re definitely not going to replace links as reliable signal. I can pay some Indian company $100 for thousands of +1 clicks and that’s even easier than buliding links. I recently paid $5 for over 800 ‘likes’ on a facebook page, so as siganl of popularity it’s not very reliable is it…
No, there isn’t any evidence other than our own observations. I actively promote linking to my site, and still only get 1 natural link for every 20 or 30 artificial ones. That must be lower than average because I categorically refuse to pay for links. I only do a couple per day that I can find myself.
For facebook maybe as that is unlimited. Google+1 is limited to one click per account, and unless Google accept 50 accounts on one phone number, that seriously limits the options of getting hundreds of clicks for $5.
I’ve worked with a client who ask me to write articles for his site. He purchased an online program to help both of us in having great writing content. The program generates keywords that can be use for the articles. I realize that we’ve been writing using the program but you won’t see his site ranking high. So I ask him to pull some tricks like link exchange, directory submission and other approaches which made a big difference to his sites. My point is, good writing content is not enough using SEO marketing strategies will.
As Google seem to go more and more in the direction of rewarding “real and related” links, and punish artificial stuff, I would be looking at plumbing/heating/gas related sites with a good pr. I am not a profesional webmaster or seo specialist so maybe I missed something, but those links won’t come cheap.
Other than by reciprocal linking, which I only do on a relatively small scale, I find it really difficult to find related links and I don’t have any real related ones.
I just rely on getting the highest PR links I can from wherever I can get them, with relevant anchor text if possible. I don’t have any paid links, partly because I don’t have a budget, but also because I’ve been able to find plenty for free. A high proportion of these have come from looking at the links to other sites in my line of business who are ranking well.
However, it is very time consuming and if I had the money I guess the reality is that I would spend it and use my time for other things!
That is really interesting. I have found a significant number of free links, but very few from high pr sites. I have found high pr sites to be difficult for getting links; how do you manage to get links from those?
Ok I will give you a specific example. When looking at a competitor’s links, I saw one from Squidoo.com which is a PR7.
I’d never heard of Squidoo so I took a look, and this particular link was a comment on someone else’s page there.
I added my own comment and gained a link.
But then I looked beyond that, and found I could set up my own page there for free. So I did that as well and got a second link from the
same PR7 site. This one is dofollow, I’m not sure about the first one but I’m not bothered. My actual page there is PR0 but Google credits
me on GWT with a link from the main site. When I get time I will add some links to my page so that I can increase the PR and thereby
its value as a link to my site. Of course, the page itself may also bring me some traffic in its own right.
As I said, many of my links come from investigating those that others had. In fact a just pinched a .edu one from your site!!
Another example is looking at applications and seeing if they can benefit you. I saw something called shinystat at the bottom of someone’s webpage.
it basically tells you how many visits you get each day to your page. I didn’t really need that, but I googled it and went to shinystat.com and added it to my site
It gives me a PR7 link (although it is reciprocated I can live with that for a PR7). I want a mixed bag of dofollow/nofollow so I only really look at PR.
Basically I look anywhere and everywhere where I think I can gain an advantage.
