Can I rank without links
-
Let's say I have great content. I have a great website design (easy to navigate for user) that answers their questions but I have no links. Can I still rank on on a keyword that has a difficulty score of 24.
I imagine that I can that google can't penalise me for not having links.
Does it mean that without links it will take longer to rank than with links but that google with rank me at some point ?
Thank you,
-
Good idea but how do I check what content is successful for my competitor ?
Thank you,
-
The key is competitor analysis I would say in your case to work out what content the others are doing successfully. In reality, I have worked in similar (managed apartments that could be rented for work or holiday in well-known cities) and done posts around attractions that have earned links ultimately increasing the site's authority and rankings. I did an outreach campaign asking the places for some input and images that we could use then I wrote the post and sent it to them. These were posts such as top attractions in x.
-
Thank for sending the information about Brian Deans Skyscraper technique. I checked his article and video and this is great but very difficult to do in certain industries like mine (the travel industry). In the travel industry, you don't answer questions or solve problems, like you do in seo. In the travel industry everyone wants the best deal but nobody is going to link to you other than journalists that work for travel publications when the decide to write an article about traveling to Tuscany and you do tours in Tuscany and you are famous (because if you are not they won't talk about you) and becoming famous requires lots of money !
Creating blog article is a good idea but nobody is going to link to me (at least I think) if I write about the best restaurants in Florence. First it isn't related to my industry (travel industry) and does anyone link to that ?
Just trying to find out what do write about to get the interest of people.
Thank you,
-
Have a look at Brian Deans Skyscraper technique - backlinko.com. in general if you put relevant content (such as decent long form blog posts) out in front of a relevant audience such as on social media you will find you automatically start to pick links up. Engage with influencers and interact with their stuff - you will find they often reciprlocate. Another technique that can be quite successful is asking others to guest post on your site or include their tips in an expert round up - that way you are often getting links without directly asking for a link. Great thing is if they don’t link other fans often will and either way you are adding more quality content to your site.
-
That makes sense. My question now is what is the best way to earn links without asking ? Create blog pages ?
Thank you,
-
Hmm, I am a big advocate of quality content and a good user experience with decent on-page SEO having a positive impact on rankings. However the majority of high ranking sites all have links - after all, they are a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google (obviously a very broad statement and not all links are equal or help). If your site is that good and lots of people visit it you would expect to earn links whether you actively go after them or not. In order to help yourself why would you not try to earn links, I would say, even if a low competition term.
In relation to your original post will it take longer to rank? There are lots of factors that can impact this but I would say it will definitely take you longer to rank and your rank would likely be lower. At a very basic level if you take two local business sites and one site does nothing other than have a great site and no links, yet the other has an equally good site but it has set up it's Google My Business and made sure it has links from relevant local directories plus maybe some local media/interest sites - Which do you think Google would trust more and rank higher? I have had some great sites that have come to me as clients - well optimised with nothing major needing changing to optimise the site but their rankings have all improved significantly in a short period of a few months through a structured outreach campaign earning links and ultimately increasing the DA. One final thought - even zero backlink experiments that have been successful have ended up naturally earning links and increasing their DA - to an extent worthy content in front of the right audience, such as social media, earns exposure/links.
Hope this makes sense...
-
On competitive keywords ? are you sure ?
is the delay to rank longer in that case ?
-
Yes you can rank without links. The key to SEO is being better than your competition. If your competition (for that keyword) is not using links and your overall optimization for that keyword is better, then you are more likely to rank. Be aware that any day your competitors might decide to improve optimization for that keyword and surpass you.
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
-
I am lost at where to go. My optimization rating is 95% + and rankings are on pages 4+. I would like to know what I should do to increase my rankings.
My site is Glare-Guard.com. My Domain Authority has not moved from 17 in a long time. i have done everything to optimize the different pages. I have 90%+ ratings for the various pages, yet I am still not even close to the first page for many of the keywords I am looking to rank for. Do you have any tips or ideas? Should I try to rewrite my content and add more information? I am just at a loss for where I should go to get the right traffic to my site. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigskyinc0 -
Can new domain extensions rank?
Hi Does anybody know if it's possible to get domains with extensions like .party or .world to rank? Even for high competitive keywords? Can they rank over .com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeWU0 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
How can a Page indexed without crawled?
Hey moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
In the google getting started guide it says **"
Note: **Pages may be indexed despite never having been crawled: the two processes are independent of each other. If enough information is available about a page, and the page is deemed relevant to users, search engine algorithms may decide to include it in the search results despite never having had access to the content directly. That said, there are simple mechanisms such as robots meta tags to make sure that pages are not indexed.
" How can it happen, I dont really get the point.
Thank you0 -
Link Building: What Can I Reasonably Expect from SEO Firm
Dear Moz Community: I am considering hiring the SEO firm that conducted a web site audit for my company. The audit was very serious and thorough. Out of 400 domains linking to my site, the audit identified 40% as toxic, 45% as suspicious and only 5% as good quality. The SEO firm believes the poor link profile is very much holding back organic ranking and traffic. I am considering signing a six month contract to have them remove the toxic and suspicious links and also, build new quality links. Basically I have the following questions: -The SEO firm hopes to build 5-10 very high quality incoming links to my site per month. Is this a reasonable number? They claim that quantity is much more important than quality. -In the six month campaign, I will be paying for one month of research by the SEO provider before the link building kicks in earnest. In fact I will only get five months of link building despite paying for six months of service. Is this fair? -Is the removal of toxic links and the development of 25-50 new quality links and enough to improve ranking and traffic over six months? The site currently receives 4,000 visitors from organic search results per month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Note that at the moment the site has only about 20 "quality" links. I would hate to exhaust my budget after six months with no tangible improvement! I would very much like to hear of anyone's experience or input regarding reasonable expectations regarding hiring an SEO firm for link building campaigns. Thanks!!!
Alan0 -
Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert780