Is it possible to have good SEO without links and with only quality content?

[Alex_Moravek]

Is it possible to have good SEO without links and with only quality content? Have you any experience?

[Trevor-Klein]

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.

[Kingof5]

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.

[Alex_Moravek]

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.

[Alex_Moravek]

...great

[Travis_Bailey]

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.

[Zippy-Bungle]

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.

[randfish]

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)

[Chris.Menke]

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.