Links don't count for SERPs anymore.

[zaldrak]

I'm done arguing with the OP.

I did it not because I feel I have anything to prove, because my ranking sites and my growing bank account are all the proof I need.

I did it because someone new to SEO could come here, read this thread and think: "cool, screw backlinks, I'll just do on-page seo". Obviously this is gonna damage some people if they take it seriously. Heck, even I, when I was new at SEO, coud have been one of those newbies and wasted a lot of time by believing some stupid shit like this and lose a lot of time on something that doesn't work. Luckily it didn't happen. I hope it doesn't happen here.

I also hate the fact that the OP has a SEO service and takes people's money, and I think this is a sentiment that any true SEO provider or outsourcer here can easily share.

Hopefully some mod or admin can intervene and solve this issue by taking appropriate measures.

Anyway, this my last post on this retarded thread, bye.

 

[_unknown_]

I'm done arguing with the OP.

I did it not because I feel I have anything to prove, because my ranking sites and my growing bank account are all the proof I need.

I did it because someone new to SEO could come here, read this thread and think: "cool, screw backlinks, I'll just do on-page seo". Obviously this is gonna damage some people if they take it seriously. Heck, even I, when I was new at SEO, coud have been one of those newbies and wasted a lot of time by believing some stupid shit like this and lose a lot of time on something that doesn't work. Luckily it didn't happen. I hope it doesn't happen here.

I also hate the fact that the OP has a SEO service and takes people's money, and I think this is a sentiment that any true SEO provider or outsourcer here can easily share.

Hopefully some mod or admin can intervene and solve this issue by taking appropriate measures.

Anyway, this my last post on this thread, bye.

This is exactly what derailed me as a newbie a long time ago. I did everything I could think of to rank my sites and didn't give backlinks a second thought. But after I pulled my hair out I thought I would try the only thing I didn't do, and now I am able to rank my sites with a lot less headache now that I know what to do..

 

[powforlife]

Its all about anchor text and RELEVANT links

 

[Reg-nbs-seo]

From Google support in their webmaster central,

the time between the visits of the GoogleBot or better say the frequency how often your site been crawled stands in relation how many links your site got.
To say it easy: As more high quality links your site has, as smaller is time between the visits of the GoogleBot.

The higher the Pr the more often the visits.
Personal tracking shows PR1 site with once a month and PR4 sites, daily.

 

[Reg-nbs-seo]

I'm done arguing with the OP.

I did it not because I feel I have anything to prove, because my ranking sites and my growing bank account are all the proof I need.

I did it because someone new to SEO could come here, read this thread and think: "cool, screw backlinks, I'll just do on-page seo". Obviously this is gonna damage some people if they take it seriously. Heck, even I, when I was new at SEO, coud have been one of those newbies and wasted a lot of time by believing some stupid shit like this and lose a lot of time on something that doesn't work. Luckily it didn't happen. I hope it doesn't happen here.

I also hate the fact that the OP has a SEO service and takes people's money, and I think this is a sentiment that any true SEO provider or outsourcer here can easily share.

Hopefully some mod or admin can intervene and solve this issue by taking appropriate measures.

Anyway, this my last post on this retarded thread, bye.

Buddy, my clients are one happy bunch. A real happy bunch.
If you cant argue intelligently and provide proof it is best you just fade away.

I am not saying you don't make money. What I am saying is that you have little concept of how that money is made.
If you think that links affect SERPs, I feel for YOUR clients. You are charging for a non existent process.
However, irrespective of SERPs, links have a traffic value. Your clients are at least getting some value.

You probably cannot separate the effects of the work you are doing to discriminate between on-page work and your link building efforts.

Most of the developers use a combined linkbuilding campaign with content development and it is one of those that is the determining factor for position.

Hey.. Show me with a definitive test and I will eat my hat.
Pick your next SEO target phrase, screen shot the visible and source of the code and document your search position and document your links and position in SERPs.
To be valid the page copy and code must not change.

You are so against the concept that you cannot see that I NEVER said not to link. Links are great, links are good, building links is a worthwhile effort. I just say that they do not do anything but bring traffic and increase PR.

They certainly don't affect SERPs.

 

[filmy]

Disposable

I am saying that links do not noticeably affect SERPs.
The amount of links you build is not going to move your search results up even one slot.
If they did the site with 277,000 links should have been in #1, regardless of content.

Links only count for PageRank now. Page rank does not affect SERPs.
Page rank is the metric Google uses to determine the frequency of it's visits to your website.
The more often it visits, the fresher your indexed content.

I respectfully disagree... I do this for a living too. I just recently took a year old website that didn't rank at all for a specific niche of generic, highly competitive keywords. I went 250 pages deep into Google -- not one serp listing for ANY of these generic, highly competitive keywords.

Now in less than a month of backlinking, this same site shows up on page 1 through 20 for all those same generic, highly competitive keyword phrases I was hoping to get them ranked for.

Notice I said backlinking... As I am NOT performing any on site SEO and trust me, none of this site's pages are doing very well with on site SEO and in fact, they are simply product pages utilizing duplicate content from the product manufacturer that just about everyone is using.

Now of course, my focus is relevant sites to get the backlink on however, given the tools that I use... HRefer and ScrapeBox combined, I am finding non-relevant sites as well since I am finding sites that might just mention the generic keyword phrase in a blog or forum post without the blog or forum actually being ABOUT that niche.

My educated guess however, is that from 15% to 25% of the sites I'm FINDING are probably related by niche while the other 75% have simply mentioned the keyword phrase I'm trying to rank for. Having said this, why TOSS OUT all those less relevant sites? While those backlinks MIGHT NOT be worth as much as the relevant backlinks, I am still utilizing the correct anchor text for these backlinks.

I've been at this for about a month and I have now broken this site into at least 6 page #1's on Google with the rest of my results extending from page 2 to 20 and remember... This website didn't show up on ANY of these keyword phrase searches down through 250 pages of Google searches BEFORE.

So while I strive to backlink to as many relevant sites as possible, I still go ahead and backlink to the less relevant because HELL, why not? Not to mention the fact that I've seen SERP movement with non relevant website backlinks utilizing the correct anchor text many times in the past and currently.

To make a blanket statement like:

I am saying that links do not noticeably affect SERPs.

Completely conflicts with my own experience... So until such time that I find that backlinks no longer work, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing...

filmy

 

[donb01]

The type of link now is crucial to getting position now.

can u expand on this a bit?

 

[ruckfules]

Even if they did, do you think google is stupid enough to tell us that 'get backlinks'. Of course they work.
"Never believe a conspiracy until it is officially denied."

 

[supamanjon]

one page seo always boosts rank the most but after that, backlinks is the way to finish it off.

 

[speakeasy602]

PR is a measurement of authority not actual SERP position. I don't care if you've been doing SEO for 15 years, this is rudamentary shit and you're wrong. Links matter, your OPINION doesn't.

Content matters equally to links, and PR increases with both content and links. I have a PR0 that ranks #1 for a highly-targeted and competitive keyword, and it's single-handedly because of the links that are pointing to it.

Rubbish

 

[BlackHatSoda]

Christ, where to start...

First off, Google thinking of no longer making PR publicly visible has nothing to do with the notion that links no longer matter. It has to do with the fact that Google doesn't want people to focus on PR (as they have said) and that they are not very accurate as the public info can be months old.

Search engines used to not factor in linking. This lead to lots of abuse with people trying to optimize pages to rank for anything and everything they could. Google based it's original ranking algorithm on the fact that linking was a better way to determine relevancy and popularity.

Your anecdotal "evidence" means nothing, it's not even good anecdotal evidence. You fail to take into account the fact that the number of total links DOES NOT MATTER. It's the quality and relevance of a link that determines weather or not it helps a particular page rank for a particular keyword and to what degree.

Google has even shown in talks examples of web sites that had thousands of backlinks and how only 2-3 were even being considered as ranking factors for those examples.

Having a bunch of crap links, non-related links, links on low PR or non authority pages, etc are worth very little. You can have a hundred thousand of those to a PR5 page and still have it beaten in the SERPS by a PR2 with 1000 links. Why? Because the second page could have links from higher quality pages that are much more related to it's topic.

 

[BlackHatSoda]

From Google support in their webmaster central,

The higher the Pr the more often the visits.
Personal tracking shows PR1 site with once a month and PR4 sites, daily.

You sure about that? I've got a PR1 site (and it's been PR1 for a year) that gets a visit from the Googlebot 2-3 times daily. The site is updated with around 4-8 unique posts per day.

I also have PR4 sites that get crawled between 3-4 times a week; the content hardly every changes.

 

[Fwiffo]

interesting thread!

not necessarily because of the OP's post, but because of so much "dogma" around SEO "truths"

So here's a possibility, not saying I agree with the OP (yet) but a possibility:

while I wasn't doing SEO back in the late 90s when google started out, I can imagine back then there were a few thread just like this one, but where the situation was reversed - one person saying "it's all about off-page" and 50 people bashing them because "it just wasn't - everyone knows that".

think about it this way: google knows that they came "to be" pretty much because the yahoo's and altavista's of the world were crammed with keyword jamming. They did something different that worked - but mostly because the other search engine's results kept kicking up crap pages loaded with crap keyword jamming just to click on someone's crappy ad because of people like us (but wearing late 90s fashion).

Now the situations are reversed - the web is polluted with crap pages, crap comments, and crap content that exist just "make a backlink" to some other crappy website that exists just to have someone click on an ad.

I'm not trying to knock it here - I make just as much of that crap as the next guy - but honestly, when you're doing your own searches and you put in "4 slice toaster" who really wants to have that result come up each and every time? (I'm not knocking the 4 slice toaster site here, in it's time that was a true beacon of hope that crappy pages truly could be SEO'd)

Imagine if someone, somewhere, came out with a "better way" to run a search engine that didn't rely on all the off page flotsam that's amassed on the web - and came up with good clear results not full of all our crap - google would be bankrupt within a year, and they know it.

So - in google's eyes - why not just beat the potential competitors to the punch? Focus back to on-page while everyone's focused on building as much off-page crap as they can. Worst case, you end up with the same results as Bing, but from their perspective, who cares? nobody's going to go there anyways as long as the results are about the same.

Is it happening? maybe. I (personally) think that data's been showing me that on-page has gone back up in importance in the last 12 months, maybe more so on the mid-to-longer-tail searches, and not necessarily as far as the OP is claiming, but something I'd absolutely love to see hard data on.

In the meantime, always be testing......

 

[ib6_ub9]

Absolutely agree fwiffo. There is just so much crap around, i have very hard time finding anything at all on google any more. All of them are some spinned text that makes no sense.

 

[bbrez1]

Ok so with your logic I can create a new website for keyword sex and don't need any backlinks and I can hit page 1 when the website gets first indexed. That's what you just said.

 

[BlackHatSoda]

interesting thread!

not necessarily because of the OP's post, but because of so much "dogma" around SEO "truths"

So here's a possibility, not saying I agree with the OP (yet) but a possibility:

while I wasn't doing SEO back in the late 90s when google started out, I can imagine back then there were a few thread just like this one, but where the situation was reversed - one person saying "it's all about off-page" and 50 people bashing them because "it just wasn't - everyone knows that".

think about it this way: google knows that they came "to be" pretty much because the yahoo's and altavista's of the world were crammed with keyword jamming. They did something different that worked - but mostly because the other search engine's results kept kicking up crap pages loaded with crap keyword jamming just to click on someone's crappy ad because of people like us (but wearing late 90s fashion).

Now the situations are reversed - the web is polluted with crap pages, crap comments, and crap content that exist just "make a backlink" to some other crappy website that exists just to have someone click on an ad.

I'm not trying to knock it here - I make just as much of that crap as the next guy - but honestly, when you're doing your own searches and you put in "4 slice toaster" who really wants to have that result come up each and every time? (I'm not knocking the 4 slice toaster site here, in it's time that was a true beacon of hope that crappy pages truly could be SEO'd)

Imagine if someone, somewhere, came out with a "better way" to run a search engine that didn't rely on all the off page flotsam that's amassed on the web - and came up with good clear results not full of all our crap - google would be bankrupt within a year, and they know it.

So - in google's eyes - why not just beat the potential competitors to the punch? Focus back to on-page while everyone's focused on building as much off-page crap as they can. Worst case, you end up with the same results as Bing, but from their perspective, who cares? nobody's going to go there anyways as long as the results are about the same.

Is it happening? maybe. I (personally) think that data's been showing me that on-page has gone back up in importance in the last 12 months, maybe more so on the mid-to-longer-tail searches, and not necessarily as far as the OP is claiming, but something I'd absolutely love to see hard data on.

In the meantime, always be testing......

It's a night thought but until Google or someone they can buy out comes up with a level of artificial intelligence advanced enough to be able to comb through hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of competing pages related to the same search and determine which provide the best information, it ain't gonna happen. In fact, a human would have trouble doing this for even a small set of pages without extensive research unless they were familiar with the topic.

The reason original search engines had indexes which were manually created by humans was because that was the best way to ensure quality. As the web grew that became far too limiting to be practical.

Keyword density based algorithms could comb through huge data sets but are easy to manipulate. That's why Google started using links as a major factor in ranking. The idea is that a link is a vote that a particular page is relevant enough to earn one. This allows links to act as a sort of human editing system. Now it's not perfect but it's just on in hundreds of factors modern search engines use.

Real tests done by many authorities in the SEO and internet marketing arenas such as SEOMoz has shown that linking is still the biggest factor and that on-page factors are important but secondary.

Think that's crap? There are tons of examples of web pages that rank #1 for keywords that appear nowhere on them or on their site for that matter. So why are they #1? Because of anchor text in their off-site backlinks. If that's not proof that what the OP is saying is wrong then what is?

 

[Fwiffo]

It's a night thought but until Google or someone they can buy out comes up with a level of artificial intelligence advanced enough to be able to comb through hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of competing pages related to the same search and determine which provide the best information, it ain't gonna happen. In fact, a human would have trouble doing this for even a small set of pages without extensive research unless they were familiar with the topic.

The reason original search engines had indexes which were manually created by humans was because that was the best way to ensure quality. As the web grew that became far too limiting to be practical.

Keyword density based algorithms could comb through huge data sets but are easy to manipulate. That's why Google started using links as a major factor in ranking. The idea is that a link is a vote that a particular page is relevant enough to earn one. This allows links to act as a sort of human editing system. Now it's not perfect but it's just on in hundreds of factors modern search engines use.

Real tests done by many authorities in the SEO and internet marketing arenas such as SEOMoz has shown that linking is still the biggest factor and that on-page factors are important but secondary.

Think that's crap? There are tons of examples of web pages that rank #1 for keywords that appear nowhere on them or on their site for that matter. So why are they #1? Because of anchor text in their off-site backlinks. If that's not proof that what the OP is saying is wrong then what is?

why does everyone get so touchy about the whole anchor text thing?

it's like someone's insulted your religion!

nobody's said that anchor text doesn't matter

The OP has said it doesn't matter as much as it used to and that too much of one set of anchor text may be a red flag(OP please correct my interpretation if I'm wrong)

I'm saying that the op may have a point because it's so "commonly believed" by "the SEO herd" that it easily could be about time for a change - to what - not sure, nor do I have data, but I'd love to see data from someone who does!

I think that where the OP and I would both agree that listening to "the heard" and the "seo authorities" and doing it "because everyone's doing it" doesn't make you right - if anything "the heard" usually all end up in one place.............

http://www.head-smashed-in.com/

 

[hatblack]

My PR0 site gets good rankings with little effort, relying only on the url keyword, some unique content and some backlinks

 

[Josh.w36]

PR doesn't mean shit! As a veteran you should know that. And, links don't influence PR at all. I have a PR3 site with only 7 links..how bout that!?

 

[Reg-nbs-seo]

PR doesn't mean shit! As a veteran you should know that. And, links don't influence PR at all. I have a PR3 site with only 7 links..how bout that!?

Josh, What is PageRank if it is not links?