Stop trying to rank pages with links. This doesn't work.

[homeriscool]

Always great advice from @splishsplash

Thanks for sharing

 

[splishsplash]

100% true advice. I did the same mistake in the past. I made backlinks only to the pages and not to the homepage thinking that my posts will rank higher.

The problem soon followed with newer posts not getting ranked easily because they also needed link juice. Had I made links to the homepage to increase the authority, I would have already ranked newer pages easily without backlinks.

Were the new pages you created within the same topic as the ones you linked to?

It should rank new pages without you needing to link to the homepage.

Site authority is a combination of :-

1) age(the longer you're ranked within a specific topic or topics, the easier things become)
2) Topical authority. This is building up authority in specific topics. It's a combination of covering a topic in-depth, but also benefits from links to pages within that topic.
3) Overall links to anywhere on the site send juice in that flows around.

You also need to make sure you've got good internal linking to help with juice flow. It doesn't flow so well with just menu links. You need to be linking related pages.

When you add new pages, you can go back to old posts and add internal links. In fact, any new page you add should be taking a particular topic more in-depth, so will have multiple pages you could add internal links from. This makes a big difference as opposed to just creating fresh orphaned pages.

But if those new pages are in new topics, you aren't going to see much of a benefit from your topical authority, regardless of the juice flowing around your site, because google doesn't let you rank for new topics that easily. Even big authority sites that look like they can will often have more topical authority than you realize.

Like just a random example I found here

"best wood stoves"

Forbes is #3.

But look at this - https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/hvac/

They have a whole section on hvac.

They have cross-over topical authority from so many topics too, which means they don't need to be *as* specialized as you do if you want to rank for wood stoves. That combined with the sheer strength and age of the domain. But you won't often see an authority site just randomly rank for something like that if it has nothing at all related.

 

[RealDaddy]

29K links

I have seen a few sites with hundreds of thousands of backlinks and they get more traffic from the backlinks than the articles they have published. Lol

 

[splishsplash]

I haven't done SEO in probably 10 years but i'm preparing a project to start next year.

Since things are getting so advanced in 2022, i never planned any link building. Just focusing on the best content i can get and maybe throw a few PPC campaigns on the best pages.

Is it "impossible" to rank without a link building strategy?

Absolutely not, but you need to know what you're doing when it comes to building topical authority, and you need a lot of content.

Look up koray gubur's writings if you want to learn more in depth about topical authority.

 

[jstover77]

Even with your site, I assume you are still building links to multiple pages, so you're probably doing things more along the lines of what I'm talking about.

But, there are always outlier cases. My advice is always aimed in the most general sense to get the largest amount of people good results.

This isn't just one website. This is hundreds of websites I've either worked on or am currently working with, so I have a large dataset to draw conclusions from (I track well over 500 websites). But yes, I use many of the strategies you are talking about.

Sounds like we are agreeing with each other. I'll see myself out. lol.

 

[qwe7410]

Niche vs higher authority backlinks
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9GRZBl2Gf5c

 

[SirLouen]

I have seen a few sites with hundreds of thousands of backlinks and they get more traffic from the backlinks than the articles they have published. Lol

You mean that they get more traffic from referral traffic than organic search?

This is definitely great. If I post a link to my site in this forum talking about something I'm explaining and many people is interested is logical that I get a good referral traffic income. But from a authority perspective is not necessarily good (I mean, it won't necessarily pump the linked page in SERPs)

It's very tricky nowadays. But still I definitely think that referral traffic is amazing specially from social media. In fact you can synergize so well that you could improve a SM properties from your site and then SM can feed back equally or even better. But still, these practices are completely away from the scope of the authority, SEO-wise.

 

[Himanshu Thakur]

Every single time that a website owner wants to rank a page, they will try to do so by placing links on it. This means that the links are pointing at a bad spammy/low quality content which will be ignored by search engines. Instead of this they should focus on content creation instead and create pages with relevant headlines and thematic content.

 

[Techpreneur]

Creating a small, thin site that's just trying to 1 page is not really going to work

I read your post. My question was off-topic. I believed you had a good experience in link building. So, I wanted to clarify my doubt. I wasn't talking about black-hat SEO, but about ranking a page that has high-quality content and targets low-competition keywords [100% white hat]. In such a case, can I build a few authority backlinks to improve the ranking of the page? What other tactics can I follow to rank a page?

 

[Techpreneur]

You don't rank pages with links. This isn't how SEO works anymore.

I completely disagree.

Rather than speaking in vague terms heres a specific example;

One of my most successful affiliate sites that makes me a good amount of monthly profit - i'd say 40% of the revenue comes from 1 page.
Not building links to that specific page and focusing on it, would be stupid..
And the fact that I did send links to that specific page definitely helped it rank for the specific term this page is about... so im not sure how you came up with your conclusion that links to specific pages dont work.

He's already mentioned that it will not work in the future. I'm not supporting him, but I also would like to get a solid answer. Can you give me more details? Did your page rank only because you built so many links?

 

[splishsplash]

I read your post. My question was off-topic. I believed you had a good experience in link building. So, I wanted to clarify my doubt. I wasn't talking about black-hat SEO, but about ranking a page that has high-quality content and targets low-competition keywords [100% white hat]. In such a case, can I build a few authority backlinks to improve the ranking of the page? What other tactics can I follow to rank a page?

Yes, you can send links direct.

Remember the key message here is not "don't build links to pages".

It's about removing the idea that you rank pages with links, and start to think more about using links to increase site authority.

If you're sending 5 links a month, do 2 to your important page and 3 to topically related pages. Just don't send all 5 to that page every month.

 

[Mr Positive]

I’ll share my story @splishsplash i came here as a newbie all I wanted was money and instant money. There was a user here he sold some cpa site. He told me just build links and bam you’ll make money.

I invested all possible savings in that site, short story greediness.

Horror story I burnt all savings and made zero income.

Later I learnt links quantity doesn’t matter, but quality and how you spread it maters.

Now I ask clients to target multiple pages at one time and maximum of 5 links per page usually it’s 1 - 3. I added brand anchors, and made site titles use like I was an authoritative site. Before google update my client was killing it, ans now it’s slow but I yet agree with your concept and thus we no longer just target links we target to make a brand it works well In the Long run.

 

[Techpreneur]

O

Yes, you can send links direct.

Remember the key message here is not "don't build links to pages".

It's about removing the idea that you rank pages with links, and start to think more about using links to increase site authority.

If you're sending 5 links a month, do 2 to your important page and 3 to topically related pages. Just don't send all 5 to that page every month.

Okay, thanks for the explanation. Do you purchase links or build them manually?

 

[Black Belt Spodermen]

Were the new pages you created within the same topic as the ones you linked to?

It should rank new pages without you needing to link to the homepage.

Site authority is a combination of :-

1) age(the longer you're ranked within a specific topic or topics, the easier things become)
2) Topical authority. This is building up authority in specific topics. It's a combination of covering a topic in-depth, but also benefits from links to pages within that topic.
3) Overall links to anywhere on the site send juice in that flows around.

You also need to make sure you've got good internal linking to help with juice flow. It doesn't flow so well with just menu links. You need to be linking related pages.

When you add new pages, you can go back to old posts and add internal links. In fact, any new page you add should be taking a particular topic more in-depth, so will have multiple pages you could add internal links from. This makes a big difference as opposed to just creating fresh orphaned pages.

But if those new pages are in new topics, you aren't going to see much of a benefit from your topical authority, regardless of the juice flowing around your site, because google doesn't let you rank for new topics that easily. Even big authority sites that look like they can will often have more topical authority than you realize.

Like just a random example I found here

"best wood stoves"

Forbes is #3.

But look at this - https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/hvac/

They have a whole section on hvac.

They have cross-over topical authority from so many topics too, which means they don't need to be *as* specialized as you do if you want to rank for wood stoves. That combined with the sheer strength and age of the domain. But you won't often see an authority site just randomly rank for something like that if it has nothing at all related.

Unfortunately, in my niche the competition is so high that all the factors like topical authority and internal linking doesn't help much except if you already have good metrics overall.

 

[seo_alexa002]

That's Why I Read Every Post and Comment Posted by @splishsplash

Always Valuable To Read, More Unique !!

 

[splishsplash]

O

Okay, thanks for the explanation. Do you purchase links or build them manually?

Purchase only. Free links are garbage.

Unfortunately, in my niche the competition is so high that all the factors like topical authority and internal linking doesn't help much except if you already have good metrics overall.

Of course. You still need links. Links are a huge part of SEO.

The problem is there is NO one size fits all for SEO..

If you're building a huge info site, you don't really need links. They help, but you're going to rank based on topical authority, and you'll pickup natural links.

If you're trying to rank for "compare car insurance", then you aren't going to do it with topical authority. BUT, you still need the topical authority. I had a client who was page 1 for car insurance, so I've looked into this exact niche + some similar big ones.

Yet, you'll also find some niches where topical authority doesn't really do anything. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are my own clients, so I won't say them.

But there are some like that where links are even MORE important, and it's just impossible to build any sort of topical authority.

So it isn't a nice easy one glove fits all.

Every site has to be looked at differently.

But, you still benefit from spreading links out a bit in almost any niche.

Something like ecommerce, you will naturally hit some main category pages higher, and this is ok. It works.

Info sites, it's best to spread out a lot, because you're getting the added bonus of increasing your topical authority more by linking to more topically relevant content.

Local websites, you can send MORE links to your homepage or service page. This is fine. I still wouldn't advise hammering, but a local site I would maybe do 50-70% to service pages. ESPECIALLY smaller ones. It depends how much good, relevant blog content you've created.

However, even for local, if I was going to be sending 50 guest posts a month(which is rarer for local. They tend to be smaller budgets), then I wouldn't send 50-70% to the service pages. I would specifically make sure the site had a good content strategy so I could be linking a good 50% of the links to the content.

It's all so variable and advice varies on a case by case basis.

The most important thing to remember is to stay away from "hammering" pages.

 

[Konyagi]

A huge misconception I see all the time is people think that you send links to a page to rank it.

This is an old school way of thinking, and while you do get a slight benefit if you send some more links to a page, it's the wrong mindset.

One of the problems with hitting a page too hard is that the machine learning trained models see it as being user built/SEO'd link building and not real/natural.

The correct way to think of link building is this :-

"I am building links to my site to raise my overall site authority"

This means you plan out your link building to appear natural. You spread your links around to the types of pages that would naturally attract links, and less so to your highly commercial pages.

That doesn't mean you can't link to commercial pages. Just balance it out. If you send 20 links per month, do 7-10 to commercial pages and 10-13 to non-commercial.

The slight exceptions is if you're running a really big site and you have a few high competition pages. In these cases you can go a LITTLE harder to your higher comp pages, but you should have a lot of good links coming in every month that are spread around so it doesn't stand out. There's a big difference between sending 10-15 links to a high comp page when you have 50-60 overall contextuals coming in every month compared with sending 5 links to your commercial page when you are only building 5-8 links per month.

However, I still do recommend restraint even in those cases. I wouldn't do more than 5-6 links to 1 page if I was building 50-60 per month, and the vast majority of pages would just get 1 or 2 links.

So the core takeaway from this is..

Stop building links to rank pages.

Build links to raise your site authority.

If you want a specific page to rank, focus more on having enough site authority, topical authority and make sure the page is satisfying the user intent of the main keywords.

I am with you on topical authority. Unfortunately, this often means producing tons of content covering multiple perspectives about your topics of interest so Google can consider you an authority in that niche. It's a labor-intensive approach but one that tends to deliver long-term results.

Content is KING
Links are QUEEN

 

[splishsplash]

I am with you on topical authority. Unfortunately, this often means producing tons of content covering multiple perspectives about your topics of interest so Google can consider you an authority in that niche. It's a labor-intensive approach but one that tends to deliver long-term results.

Content is KING
Links are QUEEN

AI content

 

[Aureus]

I think what else can be done internal linking, transferring more weight to the rank pages

or put links to page similar in context, and from it already put an internal link to rank page

 

[Jerk55]

I agree that you want to increase the overall authority of your website, which in turn allows other pages to rank on authority alone, especially with lower-hanging fruit. That being said, I build backlinks to individual pages all the time (many times in large amounts) and they almost always rank. I like to refer to this as building authority from the outside in. I have globs of data to back this up.

Also, there is no threshold when it comes to the number of links you can build to a page. Obviously quality is super important, so building a bunch of garbage to a page isn't the same as building high-quality backlinks (it's strange that I have to make this point in an SEO forum). If you are building shitty links that decay or don't index quickly, that is never good. I've said it a thousand times before; the algorithm doesn't look at positive link velocity (unless it's egregious), but negative velocity can and will bite you in the ass.

*Obligatory disclaimer - There are many factors that go into ranking a website. Link building is still the backbone of the algorithm. Nothing has changed there, but there are many other factors that dictate rankings.

You missed the point. Read again.

A huge misconception I see all the time is people think that you send links to a page to rank it.

This is an old school way of thinking, and while you do get a slight benefit if you send some more links to a page, it's the wrong mindset.

One of the problems with hitting a page too hard is that the machine learning trained models see it as being user built/SEO'd link building and not real/natural.

The correct way to think of link building is this :-

"I am building links to my site to raise my overall site authority"

This means you plan out your link building to appear natural. You spread your links around to the types of pages that would naturally attract links, and less so to your highly commercial pages.

That doesn't mean you can't link to commercial pages. Just balance it out. If you send 20 links per month, do 7-10 to commercial pages and 10-13 to non-commercial.

The slight exceptions is if you're running a really big site and you have a few high competition pages. In these cases you can go a LITTLE harder to your higher comp pages, but you should have a lot of good links coming in every month that are spread around so it doesn't stand out. There's a big difference between sending 10-15 links to a high comp page when you have 50-60 overall contextuals coming in every month compared with sending 5 links to your commercial page when you are only building 5-8 links per month.

However, I still do recommend restraint even in those cases. I wouldn't do more than 5-6 links to 1 page if I was building 50-60 per month, and the vast majority of pages would just get 1 or 2 links.

So the core takeaway from this is..

Stop building links to rank pages.

Build links to raise your site authority.

If you want a specific page to rank, focus more on having enough site authority, topical authority and make sure the page is satisfying the user intent of the main keywords.