Does Whitehat SEO works ?

I had being in IM & SEO business for a while, like everyone here, I start with Whitehat SEO, or let's say no SEO at all,
What's made me first search and read about SEO in that time, I saw many spammy websites with poor contents ranked very high compare to me, G were sending me 4-6 visitors/ weeks,
And about two years ago, guy asked me to write(good contents) articles for his new website(it was couple months old) and he was aiming for very big KW(on my region) , I looked for his BL history and I couldn't find any and the domain ween't registered before,that time he was having 5-6 major competitors in his niche.
To be honest writing contents on that site were too hard, yest it toke from me two at least days to write single article, and the payment were not that good (even for developing countries)
that guy were able to write ~300-500 article in his site , because he hired many writers, and he was having very restricted scheduler, in that time I thought this guy will take two years at least to get his money back, but all of sudden, the results were start appears in less than a year he start appear on very competitive KW on second page even some KW's in the first page.
I'm not trying to pretend to have best writing skills , but honesty on that site I tried to write very professional (magazine style) article, the users can't skip any part of it because to was so informative about all aspect of the KW, and yes my articles ranked in the first page 3-6 position behind the official /authority sites, one of the articles got ~half million visit/view in less than year .
So I'm asking is this guy were using Whitehat SEO only or he used hidden BL to boost his site ranks .

Whitehat has never worked in my case and I don't believe that anyone can rank for even medium competition keywords without building backlinks.

mainceaft said:

I had being in IM & SEO business for a while, like everyone here, I start with Whitehat SEO, or let's say no SEO at all,
What's made me first search and read about SEO in that time, I saw many spammy websites with poor contents ranked very high compare to me, G were sending me 4-6 visitors/ weeks,
And about two years ago, guy asked me to write(good contents) articles for his new website(it was couple months old) and he was aiming for very big KW(on my region) , I looked for his BL history and I couldn't find any and the domain ween't registered before,that time he was having 5-6 major competitors in his niche.
To be honest writing contents on that site were too hard, yest it toke from me two at least days to write single article, and the payment were not that good (even for developing countries)
that guy were able to write ~300-500 article in his site , because he hired many writers, and he was having very restricted scheduler, in that time I thought this guy will take two years at least to get his money back, but all of sudden, the results were start appears in less than a year he start appear on very competitive KW on second page even some KW's in the first page.
I'm not trying to pretend to have best writing skills , but honesty on that site I tried to write very professional (magazine style) article, the users can't skip any part of it because to was so informative about all aspect of the KW, and yes my articles ranked in the first page 3-6 position behind the official /authority sites, one of the articles got ~half million visit/view in less than year .
So I'm asking is this guy were using Whitehat SEO only or he used hidden BL to boost his site ranks .

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There is really no such thing as Whitehat SEO and Blackhat SEO.

They are far far too "black and white".

There's just one way to build a site, and you can move along the spectrum towards more white, or more black.

But the answer you're looking for is you can rank a site without getting any backlinks if you're very heavy on the content, yes. An informational niche with 500 articles will rank for a lot without any backlinks providing you're getting good topical coverage, and not creating content in different areas.

Hard to rank non-info sites without backlinks though. Ecommerce, gambling, adult etc.

white hat SEO works for the little guy like you and me. The sharks game the system on a big scale, that's why you see them ranking above you, and that's how they make millions of $$$ per month, while we make few cents per day.

White hat SEO (no link building) means ranking your website purely because of the amazing content that google wants us to believe that it cares about. And yes, you can rank with this type of content without backlinks but only when you target the right keywords (keywords that no one targets), that's why you can rank with white hat SEO, not because google is overly impressed with its quality. This is bullshit thrown at us to keep the sharks at top and breaking the banks.

If you want to take the spots of those sharks you have to do black hat SEO (link building)

Whitehat SEO does work...and is a lot of hard work. The funny thing about backlinking is that you can do it without doing it. What I mean is, if you deliver great content and are able to get visitors to a page, then it will be linked to naturally...hence you get backlinks without trying to.

You need to round a strategy using the least competitive kws in order to rank without links. Challenge lies in evaluating them manually as the score varies rigorously over different tools. Ahrefs included.

secguy said:

Whitehat SEO does work...and is a lot of hard work. The funny thing about backlinking is that you can do it without doing it. What I mean is, if you deliver great content and are able to get visitors to a page, then it will be linked to naturally...hence you get backlinks without trying to.

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Can you please let me know about a few sites which have successfully gained all backlinks naturally ? I don't understand the fact that who links to you when the only person who visits the site for years is only you...
I have never seen any of my sites get traffic and rank within a year while building no links at all.

I had a keyword ranking on top2 for half of a year. My contant was waaay better than the first ranked page and other pages on the first search page overall. But for no reason my page could not outrank him. I about a month ago invested about 500 for niche edits (quality ones) and you know what yesterday I climbed up to the top 1. Links are still there guys, they are still ruling google.

mukul555 said:

Can you please let me know about a few sites which have successfully gained all backlinks naturally ? I don't understand the fact that who links to you when the only person who visits the site for years is only you...
I have never seen any of my sites get traffic and rank within a year while building no links at all.

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No one will share such sites because they will normally have gem keywords. But it's possible man, with a proper keyword research and on page, you can get very good amount of organic traffic.

tazarbm said:

you can rank with this type of content without backlinks but only when you target the right keywords (keywords that no one targets), that's why you can rank with white hat SEO, not because google is overly impressed with its quality. This is bullshit thrown at us to keep the sharks at top and breaking the banks

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Thanks for saying the true, I may self maybe wrote thousand article in 10 years period, even trier 1 articles I wrote my self and never use generated contents, but i got issue with all websites I create they get sink in SERP very fast, like G had spam detection methods for test new websites in the first three months or so, I know very fast if G likes my new site in first two weeks, because one of my best site every boosted to 700 visitors/day after two weeks from registring it because it had very strong BL, all other website I own G treat them like sht, like tell them (to die I have enough contents to threw at my users )

secguy said:

if you deliver great content and are able to get visitors to a page, then it will be linked to naturally

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You know one of my old websites(expired now) got referred(back link) from government institute because of article I write, but G didn't give sht about it maybe that website were not ranking that well(I guess it was kinda new) and didn't save my website to rank even on that KW, it was not competitive KW I was first page for about a year (because i was almost the only person write about that KW) later a shitty wikipidia page ranked first and the sapammy sites discover it and they all occupied the first page and my website were throwing to the 2d and 3d page Hallelujah

tazarbm said:

white hat SEO works for the little guy like you and me. The sharks game the system on a big scale, that's why you see them ranking above you, and that's how they make millions of $$$ per month, while we make few cents per day.

White hat SEO (no link building) means ranking your website purely because of the amazing content that google wants us to believe that it cares about. And yes, you can rank with this type of content without backlinks but only when you target the right keywords (keywords that no one targets), that's why you can rank with white hat SEO, not because google is overly impressed with its quality. This is bullshit thrown at us to keep the sharks at top and breaking the banks.

If you want to take the spots of those sharks you have to do black hat SEO (link building)

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Not at all. This is is a super simplistic view.

Amazing content doesn't rank.

Content that the machine learning thinks most closely will match the user intent will rank. That's not always the best content. It's what the machine learning things the user will like the most.

And when your site has high topical authority in your niche, you'll rank higher without links. It's as simple as that.

Ranking comes from juice, topical authority and searcher intent matching. The more closely you match the searcher intent, the higher up you'll be. The more topical authority you have in that niche, the higher up you'll be. The more juice you have, the higher up you'll be. And you also get juice from internal links. Every single article you write on your site comes with juice.

mainceaft said:

Thanks for saying the true, I may self maybe wrote thousand article in 10 years period, even trier 1 articles I wrote my self and never use generated contents, but i got issue with all websites I create they get sink in SERP very fast, like G had spam detection methods for test new websites in the first three months or so, I know very fast if G likes my new site in first two weeks, because one of my best site every boosted to 700 visitors/day after two weeks from registring it because it had very strong BL, all other website I own G treat them like sht, like tell them (to die I have enough contents to threw at my users )

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no problem, amigo. I'm as bothered by google's whoring behaviour as you are

mukul555 said:

Can you please let me know about a few sites which have successfully gained all backlinks naturally ? I don't understand the fact that who links to you when the only person who visits the site for years is only you...
I have never seen any of my sites get traffic and rank within a year while building no links at all.

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we dont have to go far to find such sites: sites like matt diggity and mathew woodward get many natural links because of the contents that they provide. (no one can really say that 100% of their backlinks are all natural, but I am pretty sure that these guys are no longer involved in securing backlinks these days. those links come naturally now).

now it is very difficult to duplicate what these guys have done!

splishsplash said:

Amazing content doesn't rank

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that's exactly what I said. You can have the greatest content in the world, but unless you get backlinks you won't see any rankings. And the only instances in which you will get rankings is when google doesn't have content to show for those keywords. But even then it won't be your amazing content that ranks, it's the fact that the content exists that ranks. It could be complete gibberish.

But funny how google preaches to us to focus on creating "good quality content" and they will take care of the rest. Sure, they will take care of the rest by completely ignoring the little guy and giving the delicious rankings to the filthy rich or known brands because those are the ones who need money the most (sarcasm)

splishsplash said:

Content that the machine learning thinks most closely will match the user intent will rank

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And that's the problem! We have gotten to the "hands" of machines to tell us how to think, when to breathe, or what authority and value mean. This is what saddens me. I don't like it when technology replaces the humans

fb3003 said:

we dont have to go far to find such sites: sites like matt diggity and mathew woodward get many natural links because of the contents that they provide

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I'm not in position of you or these guys, since my website is not English contents, I know G had big manual review team that manually review English contents site specially big ones, they will get their chance to get review even after a year waiting, that's not something impossible, sure G are doing reverse engineering ranking methods against their algorithm,
if any of you tried to write bot or any AI tools he knows what I means, contents size on the internet. G can't relies on their algorithm only to rank websites, if they do we will get back to mid 2000's were spammy sites ranked on very important KW's
back to subject since my website were not English writing, i have no hope to got any manual review at all even if I wrote a thousand good contents articles, because G team on my region don't care at all, they're just lazy AF.

pure white hat seo doesn't exist anymore

fb3003 said:

we dont have to go far to find such sites: sites like matt diggity and mathew woodward get many natural links because of the contents that they provide. (no one can really say that 100% of their backlinks are all natural, but I am pretty sure that these guys are no longer involved in securing backlinks these days. those links come naturally now).

now it is very difficult to duplicate what these guys have done!

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I'm no Matt Diggity or Matthew Woodward and even my neighbourhood barely know me haha. The point is that if you build an affiliate site and keep posting articles on even some low competition keywords, there are very high chances that you won't rank. Like 97% and for the rest, you are just lucky. I've seen sites from people who don't know anything about SEO getting ranked and then eventually they get their site tanked and are unable to grow any of their sites again because they're caught up in a myth that whitehat works.

If I start a random affiliate site, people won't link to me even though I have this amazing content written by an amazing native writer for $80/1000 words. The reason being that no one knows my site exists as it isn't ranked anywhere.

Either you spray and pray with the articles or you target really low competition keywords and again pray that you get ranked. Is it really something you want to do for your career and miss out on the MAJOR part of SEO that is link building ?

If you're just doing it for temporary money gain then it's okay but if you aim to be someone like Matt or any big player for instance, they have agencies offering Link Building services which are making crazy amount of money every month. Are people fools wasting thousands and thousands on links while there are people who can rank just with their HQ content ?

Also, it isn't that if you get 100% of your links naturally, you won't get hit by an Algo update. So you basically wait for years to get ranked and when you start making money, get hit by an algo update and you're done.

Just build links.

tazarbm said:

that's exactly what I said. You can have the greatest content in the world, but unless you get backlinks you won't see any rankings. And the only instances in which you will get rankings is when google doesn't have content to show for those keywords. But even then it won't be your amazing content that ranks, it's the fact that the content exists that ranks. It could be complete gibberish.

But funny how google preaches to us to focus on creating "good quality content" and they will take care of the rest. Sure, they will take care of the rest by completely ignoring the little guy and giving the delicious rankings to the filthy rich or known brands because those are the ones who need money the most (sarcasm)

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What I'm saying is "amazing content" doesn't rank. No matter what You can send all the backlinks to your amazing content and it still won't rank.

What ranks is the RIGHT content, which doesn't have to be "amazing". It just needs to be what the machine learning considers right for the searcher intent.

Too long = no good.

Too detailed = no good

The wrong topics = no good.

You can have a big 10k word, incredible, comprehensive guide that's the most scientific and detailed in existence, and it won't rank if the machine learning thinks the user wants a 700 word article with a table and some images.

tazarbm said:

And that's the problem! We have gotten to the "hands" of machines to tell us how to think, when to breathe, or what authority and value mean. This is what saddens me. I don't like it when technology replaces the humans

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That's not how it works, brother.

The technology is only understanding what the humans want. It's not telling anyone what they want.

But you, as a search marketer need to look at what the machine thinks the humans want, not what *you* think the humans want, because, the machine is more accurate than you are.

It's using big data to identify what the searcher intent is most likely to be. That's all.

Nothing is no white-hat SEO in my opinion. Anything that is intended to manipulate the Search engine rankings are blackhat SEO in Google's eyes.