ranking a website without links? Seems unreasonable to me in todays time BUT in 2006, I started my internet career and that time I didn't know anything about SEO or Rankings. I used to give Classified Ads in a big national newspaper and the ad used to be published throughout the country (India). The traffic I used to recieve was just Type in traffic (after seeing my ad in national daily) and this process was continues for approx 2 years. After around 2 years I stopped to place ads in national daily and abondoned the site (got involved in some other projects) and to my surprise, one day when I was just having a look at the stats, the website started to recieve good traffic itself (ranked) and the keywords it ranked were very high competition kws. In later years, I sold the side and made a fortune out of that. But in todays time, I don't know if it could be achievable Or not
It's still possible these days, but you're right about it being kind of unreasonable, and I'll explain why in a minute. Even though I was poking fun at the OP's thread, I know it's possible to rank without backlinks in modern times (remember, I'm the creator of the guide titled, "
The Ultimate Guide To Ranking A Website Without Building Backlinks"; don't bump it, I'm tired of answering the same questions).
The real problem with trying to rank without backlinks that makes it unreasonable is that you're focusing only on on-page factors when you should be focusing on both on-page and off-page factors. Since backlinks are a
major factor, when you omit them from your SEO strategy, you're leaving your competitors with the chance to easily outrank your site in the SERPs just by building quality backlinks.
Of course, if you're good with on-page SEO and you choose the right keywords to begin with, you can procure backlinks through ranking your site on the first page of the SERPs (your site is unlikely to rank in the top 3, even for very low competition keywords with under 200 searches/month) to get visitors and basically hope that they link back to the article (in my experience, they usually do, but it's not guaranteed).
For the potential time investment and all the work that's required, most people are better off building backlinks unless they're like me and they prefer focusing on content and on-page SEO at the same time. It's not even so much the time it takes to rank individual keywords that takes long, but it's the number of low traffic-low competition keywords you have to target in order to get decent traffic.
