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
-
Where to Place Quality Content in Order to Create Links?
Assuming we have retained a an award winning journalist to write articles/blog posts about our business. Assuming the content is useful and engaging. Where would be the best place to publish it to create high quality backlinks? 1. Our website blog
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Social media sites like our LinkedIn or Facebook pages.
3. Sending completed articles to websites that might potentially have an interest in publishing them.
4. Publishing the articles on our website and then promoting them with Adwords and Facebook to demographics that would find them interesting and link to them.
5. Combination of publishing an article on our website and posting a related article on social media and linking it back to the original article on our website.
6. Place a custom written article of extremely high quality on affiliate website run by the HOTH or a competitor. But before publishing check the affiliate website on AHREFS and Link Research Tools to ensure that the metrics are not at all spammy (decent domain rating). Which of the above options (or combination of) would most likely result in backlinks of good quality? Assume the quality of the writing is excellent. If pitching the content to other websites (#3) would work, how would we identify these websites? Thanks,
Alan0 -
508 compliance vs good SEO re: Image alt tags
I'm currently in debate with our 508 compliance team over the use of alt tags on images. For SEO, it is best practice to use alt tags so that readers can tell what the image represents. However, they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. I feel they are taking the "decorative" image concept in 508 compliance too far. It's intention is for images for bullets, etc that truly are decorative in nature and add no benefit to the reader. What is the communities thoughts on this? Have you ever run into scenario where 508 is attempting to ruin SEO? Usually the 2 play nicely.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpfleiderer0 -
SEO best practices for embedding content in a map
My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015 From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map. We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I? The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank. so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love? Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!1 -
Google Authorship: Having others write content and authorship link to/from G+ profiles Impact Ranking?
Hi all! I am considering having several others write content for a new website and authorship link each to/from G+ profiles. Any idea of how that will Impact page/website ranking? I would think it would give more credibility to each page, and the website as a whole. No?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Does Automated High Quality Content Look Like Low Quality to Search Engines?
I have 1,000+ pages that all have very similar writing, but different results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Example:
Nr of days on market
Average sales price
Median sales price
etc etc etc All the results are very different for each neighborhood. However, as per the above, the wording is similar. The content is very valuable to users. However, I am concerned search engines may see it as low quality content, as wording is identical across all these pages (except the results). Any view on this? Any examples to back up such views?0 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
WMT Index Status - Possible Duplicate Content
Hi everyone. A little background: I have a website that is 3 years old. For a period of 8 months I was in the top 5 for my main targeted keyword. I seemed to have survived the man eating panda but not so sure about the blood thirsty penguin. Anyway; my homepage, along with other important pages, have been wiped of the face of Google's planet. First I got rid of some links that may not have been helping and disavowed them. When this didn't work I decided to do a complete redesign of my site with better content, cleaner design, removed ads (only had 1) and incorporated social integration. This has had no effect at all. I filed a reconsideration request and was told that I have NOT had any manual spam penalties made against me, by the way I never received any warning messages in WMT. SO, what could be the problem? Maybe it's duplicate content? In WMT the Index Status indicates that there are 260 pages indexed. However; I have only 47 pages in my sitemap and when I do a site: search on Google it only retrieves 44 pages. So what are all these other pages? Before I uploaded the redesign I removed all the current pages from the index and cache using the remove URL tool in WMT. I should mention that I have a blog on Blogger that is linked to a subdomain on my hosting account i.e. http://blog.mydomain.co.uk. Are the blog posts counted as pages on my site or on Blogger's servers? Ahhhh this is too complicated lol Any help will be much appreciated! Many thanks, Mark.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nortski0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0