How are sites ranking with few backlinks?

FrozenSpade

FrozenSpade

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I can't figure out how sites are ranking with few(~50) backlinks ot no backlinks at all, even in competitive niches for tough keywords, whereas Others are not ranking so good with hundreds of backlinks. It used to be different a year ago. What changed?

What is now more important then before?
 
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zombietechs said:
well please feel free to share
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if they rank high with no / few backlinks in competitive niches it is likely that they use PBNs and block the spiders so that you cannot find the backlinks with ahrefs etc. You find multiple threads here about that topic when you search for block/ing spiders etc
 
It's not always about # of backlinks. I have a site where I haven't done any backlinking. I've had it for over 2 years now and I get about 100,000 visitors a month organically from Google. Another 50,000 visitors from direct/referrals. It's all about content imo. Good content will be shared by others anyways so you'll get backlinks naturally.

I have a forum with 800,000 posts, no backlnk work but Google has indexed 625,000 pages from my site. My pages rank for competitive keywords too. I only focus on social media marketing.
 
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Anyone who believe this crap, take a read here http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/743171-stop-believing-these-10-search-engine-optimization-lies-right-now-truth-will-set-you-free.html

Star Anise said:
It's not always about # of backlinks. I have a site where I haven't done any backlinking. I've had it for over 2 years now and I get about 100,000 visitors a month organically from Google. Another 50,000 visitors from direct/referrals. It's all about content imo. Good content will be shared by others anyways so you'll get backlinks naturally.

I have a forum with 800,000 posts, no backlnk work but Google has indexed 625,000 pages from my site. My pages rank for competitive keywords too. I only focus on social media marketing.
Click to expand...
 
Are you saying that I'm lying about my forum getting 100,000 visitors per month without any backlink work? I'm not saying backlinks won't help you. I'm saying it's not always about the # of backlinks. It is about content and quality of backlinks for these sites that rank up high with little backlinks. If you get backlinks from authority sites and have good content that people like to share, you can rank up well and maybe even better than having lots of trash backlinks and bad content.

I read #4 from the link you shared and I disagree that you have to be a trusted source like Huffington Post to garner social shares. Anyone can start their own trusted brand if they do it right. How do you think Perez Hilton's blog became so big? He was a nobody at some point right? All he does is share gossip/rumors about celebrities and he became a household name for a bunch of teenagers and authority sites and reliable news sources share his links sometimes.
 
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It is very possible to rank without backlinks.

Will you rank for payday loans? NO
 
1 - I am pretty sure Star Anise isn't lying. With Such Huge websites you can rank for dazillion of keywords and get that kind of traffic

2 - @OP : There are many scenarios

---> On Page optimization is REALLY important and you can save a lot of backlink making with the right On Page optimization, website structure

---> The Quality of Backlinks will keep the Quantity all the time. 10 Strong Backlinks from PBN will beat 10000 backlink on social bookmarks...etc ! Actually, it's easier to get hit by the backlinks now than getting ranked

---> If it's Competitive Keyword that makes real money then people are ranking using redirects and pbn. In both cases you won't find the backlinks :D
 
It could be tiered backlinks with few quality tier 1 links and thousands of tier 2 and tier 3 links. This actually works well if you do it correctly with quality tier1 properties with multiple pages.
 
Most website owners engaging in blackhat SEO actually hide their real backlinks which is why you fail to understand how to reverse engineer them. This also make competition analysis tools ineffective.
 
OP, as plenty have said - you dont actually know how many BL's any given site has.
 
backlinks definitely seem to be helping but quality does appear to be the most meaningful practice to observe. I signed on with moz to check out what they have to offer and it turns out their recommendations are pretty good for getting your site ready for what I call "google presentation" for lack of a better term. My sites which do not have all the basics addressed tend not to rank well, but after applying a lot of the moz fixes, google rewards the site with more exposure probably because it is somehow classified as more relevant. I'm not a pro so don't quote me, these are just my observations.

In addition, by going out and manually building links on related sites, I've noticed my DA and PA climb really high and my site doesn't appear to be triggering any spam warnings. I do have a running blog roll on my homepage and duplicate content was really screwing me so I removed all the categories and other classifications and limited the sitemap to just pages and posts. Combined with the aforementioned practices my authority went from 10 up to 30 and some pages are as high as 40 for the PA. Again, the exposure I'm receiving is way better than before but there are still some core keywords that I'm using which are ranking lower than my competitors in the local packs. Any advice?
 
Hi, In my point of view backlink alone is not important to increase the rank of a page, the quality of a page may depend on the originality of the contents...In another ways backlinks may be available but it may be hidden........
 
Content, good technical SEO and the odd backlink.... If you're smashing out wordpress blog posts also remember that page rank sculpting is beneficial (a lot of content otherwise gets pushed down)
 
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