Is it possible to have good SEO without links and with only quality content?
-
Is it possible to have good SEO without links and with only quality content? Have you any experience?
-
Alex, sorry it's taken a bit for us to get this one published -- but I wanted to let you know, this Whiteboard Friday will be published tomorrow morning, 10/24.
-
Possible? Yes. Likely? No. And I'm assuming that by good SEO you mean ranking well in Google.
Links are still the biggest factor for ranking. Matt Cutts repeated this again recently and studies back it up. Don't let the anti-link builders, pro-relationship builders, or whatever they're calling themselves at the moment brainwash you.
-
Hi Chris, Rand, Travis, Zippy and all the fans-moz,
In our agency we have very good results in some sites only with quality content, but ... but only on websites with easy competition and also for the quality of content, are gaining natural links (as it should be :)) .
My answer to the question "Is it possible to have good SEO without links and with only quality content?" is: yes and no.
You can only do a good SEO with quality content that these contents are slowly gaining good links.My answer to the question "Is it possible to have good SEO without linkbuilding and with only without quality content?" is: YES
The link building is a dialogue and not a single order, the link building is an alliance of mutual benefit rather than a purchase. -
...great
-
I've managed a few campaigns where the client had zilch domain age, in a competitive space. My team and I squeezed everything we could out of on-page. The results were in line with my expectations. (Local targeting. The clients showed on the first page within a couple weeks. I have high expectations.)
Granted, we do get a handful of links at the beginning. Not doing so is just crazy talk. Though I realize this is a discussion thread.
What I will say is that I'm getting more traction with less links. So either we're just getting stupid lucky with links, or we've become god-like with on-page. Though I would realistically think that on-page is getting a significant boost and we're doing as well as we've ever done; perhaps a bit better, given experience.
-
Hi Alex,
I've some trepidation about going up against whiteboard Friday but my experience is that it is possible for less competitive keywords. I do inhouse SEO for a company in an industrial B2B market. To a large extent there are few link building opportunities and most of the ones there are on directory sites. There are no blogs and social media is non-existent.
So we target about a 100 keywords that have a moz difficulty of between 17 and 25%. They probably have about 50 - 200 global exact searches a month on Google. A single converting enquiry can lead to $200,000 in sales.
So given that we, and all our competitors, have little support from link building, the battle is all about onpage optimisation. Out of maybe 100 global competitors about 20 have a web presence that is more than trivial. Of these there are 3 companies (including mine) that dominate search rankings (98% of 1-3 positions of the keywords we target are held by one of these 3).
Page and Domain authorities are in the low thirties and many product pages have a PA of 1. Life to a large extent consists in identifying new non obvious keywords for link bait articles that then drive traffic to product pages, and also in taking existing keywords and breaking them apart into more exact matches.
-
Hi Alex - I actually filmed a whiteboard friday about this today! In the next few weeks, you should see it go to the main blog (and I cited you in there - hope that's OK)
-
Alex,
It is possible to have good on-page SEO, meaning that the site is crawalable, copy aligns with meta data, internal linking and navigation are worded correctly, and keyword research was done appropriately. However if the keywords you've chosen to target were also targeted by competitors with sites/pages that have have back links pointing at them, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to compete against them without sufficient back links of your own. It boils down to the fact that links are an important ranking factor and most of the time (unless you target super-uncompetitive keywords) you need them to be competitive.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type.
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type. Website niche - Animation and 3D Rendering Studios Backlink from - http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html the anchor tag is image URL from one of the many images in that post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
Deep linking with redirects & building SEO
Hi there. I'm using deep linking with unique URL's that redirect to our website homepage or app (depending on whether the user accesses the link from an iphone or computer) as a way to track attribution and purchases. I'm wondering whether using links that redirect negatively affects our SEO? Is the homepage still building SEO rank despite the redirects? I appreciate your time & thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | L_M_SEO0 -
Internal link from blog content to commercial pages risks?
Hi guys, Has anyone seen cases where a site has been impacted negatively from internal linking from blog content to commercial based pages (e.g. category pages). Anchor text is natural and the links improve user experience (i.e it makes sense to add them, they're not forced). Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
23k Links from one doman pointing to a single page, good or bad?
Hey all, So I found a domain that GWT tells me has 23k links pointing to a landing page. I found that the link is part of their global nav as a text ad and that's why it's probably registering so many links. The site has a DA of 56, is this a bad thing? Could it be hurting the rest of my site's ability to rank? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
SEO-Friendly Method to Load XML Content onto Page
I have a client who has about 100 portfolio entries, each with its own HTML page. Those pages aren't getting indexed because of the way the main portfolio menu page works: It uses javascript to load the list of portfolio entries from an XML file along with metadata about each entry. Because it uses javascript, crawlers aren't seeing anything on the portfolio menu page. Here's a sample of the javascript used, this is one of many more lines of code: // load project xml try{ var req = new Request({ method: 'get', url: '/data/projects.xml', Normally I'd have them just manually add entries to the portfolio menu page, but part of the metadata that's getting loaded is project characteristics that are used to filter which portfolio entries are shown on page, such as client type (government, education, industrial, residential, industrial, etc.) and project type (depending on type of service that was provided). It's similar to filtering you'd see on an e-commerce site. This has to stay, so the page needs to remain dynamic. I'm trying to summarize the alternate methods they could use to load that content onto the page instead of javascript (I assume that server side solutions are the only ones I'd want, unless there's another option I'm unaware of). I'm aware that PHP could probably load all of their portfolio entries in the XML file on the server side. I'd like to get some recommendations on other possible solutions. Please feel free to ask any clarifying questions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaneJamison0 -
What is the effect on using jQuery sliders for content on SEO?
I know using css in subversive manners gets you dinged for points. I didnt know if JS counted the same since you are essentially hiding parts of the content and showing it in intervals as slides. The goal would be having key items for a client in divs and rotating those divs via a slider plugin as slides. I was just curious if that effected things in any way. Thanks! ~Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peb72680