Is ranking a website basic purely on content possible.

R0meo said:

if you manage to find a niche with LOADS of kws and the first google page is something like :

#1 -pr0
#2 -pr1
#3 -N/A
#4 -N/A
#5 - pr0

pure content and social presence would do a job just fine.

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This one is extremely easy. In reality it is easy to rank for much tougher competition with 400-500 pages site.

One problems is that suckers competitors will report your site if the content quality is substandard.

R0meo said:

i would not be sure thinking that google is not getting better on valuating content quality - and i am not talking about grammar nor spelling.


their technology are light years ahead

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They cannot use NLP because they do not have enough CPU power. So they use Naive Bayes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier

There is one more critical factor which is important in ranking without backlinks is "CSI" aka " Content Saturation Index". What I mean here is if your website is in a niche like " Car Insurance" then it will be hard to rank for even the long tail initially coz there is super content getting published day in and day out and getting indexed. Whether it is on your main website or for backlinking. CSI is very high for competitive niches. On the contrary if you are targeting a niche with low CSI like "pegion racing" then ranking for keywords will be much faster.

Best Regards,
Akbar

Killix said:

Totally agree with you on that, no point in linkbuilding to a site that has crappy content and not even the basics started. I posted 100 articles to this site with perfect onsite seo and so on before i did any form of linking.

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Exactly Build a well oiled highly tuned engagement & conversion machine - THEN worry about links.

Well actually then worry about traffic, links & SEO come last when your already making money/established the site.

Most people get this the wrong way round.

moonlighsunligh said:

I didn't say anything about profits, however if I had 20 000 visits I would probably earn around $5K. Newbies probably even less. You earned $35K. Is your secret in building a list and promoting affiliate offers using this list.

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My secret isn't really a secret - I find out what people want and give it to them.

For the most part I realised that what I did every single day brainlessly was actually helpful to some people - so started recording what I did and packaged it up as a tutorial.

When people sign up to my email lsit, the first thing I ask is how can I help them. I spend a lot of time answering these emails. Later on I ask them what tutorial they want to see next and I've made a bunch of tutorials based on user requests and have a huge list of ideas.

So as long as the audience keeps telling me what they want and I keep giving it to them its win win.

The next series will be building a site from scratch and making its first sale over my shoulder step by step - readers will be able to follow along week by week with the updates I create and have full transparency of the site and analytics to check it all out for themselves as a reference point.

Why am I doing all that?

Because thats what the readers want.

MatthewWoodward said:

Exactly Build a well oiled highly tuned engagement & conversion machine - THEN worry about links.
Well actually then worry about traffic, links & SEO come last when your already making money/established the site.
Most people get this the wrong way round.

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I do not agree with the point that you need to first think on conversion rate. It is nothing if no visitors come to a site. Even with crappy content build only for Google if one targets buyer keyword he would still earn at least something (1/3 of what he would be earning with normal content). But without traffic je would earn nothing.

So,for traffic without much links, it is better to write 500 medium-grade articles than 100 high-quality ones. But it is the same if you can write over 500 quality ones - however that would require over 1 year of work. On their own longer and more quality articles don't rank better.

Having said that if you build links or do PPC conversion is everything, except in niches with many products where it is better to cover any product keyword there is.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't do both. If you want to rank stuff easily you need some website authority. Get authority by writing content, building links, guest blogging, whatever. Then start drilling out the content. Also, lots of my clients who are small businesses aka city alarm company, using a content strategy for them wouldn't really be that helpful or affordable for them. However, building links and ranking them organically via regular listing and places listing works great.

awesome thread, i actually have been wondering the same thing too lol since im making an authority site

r3v01uti0n said:

Thanks for the video, learned some new stuff.

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No worrys It really pissed me off!

And look at it like this, if thats what the big boys do with their multi million budgets - what can you do?

moonlighsunligh said:

In your niche -digital product this is the way to to. Generally, a site needs to have at least one unique selling point, and I always make sure to add many of them.

For conversion there are few factors, and I am always trying to address as much as possible :
1) Value and way to express this value (why this site and not competitor)
2) Motive (keyword)
3) Friction
4) Anxiety

However I see loads of sites on weebly, wordpress.com and so on using auto-spun content and they actually earn money because they rank for buyer-keywords. But i do not use auto-spun content eben for tier2 links.

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My niche isn't digital products , its a playground to share my knowledge/experience and educate people whether thats increasing conversion, building links or indepth analysis/analytics. It's more focused on helping people than anything else and your right, I suppose that in itself is a USP in the IM world.

I don't agree with any of your points for conversion though. It should be more like-

1) engage
2) build trust/relationship
3) sell

Once you have number 1 and 2 in place the web is no longer price sensitive and prices can be increased.

The only problem is most e-commerce stores are setup like self service checkouts in supermarkets. Really cold and isolated in the fact you walk in, get molested with offers, walk around, pick up what you want, check it out yourself, bag it up yourself and walk out the store with no interaction of any kind - the name of the store is irrelevant.

Compare that experience with walking into an Apple store.

Now apply that approach to the web.

Obviously that is a very simple view of it, in order to do points 1 and 2 we need to understand the different segments of our audience and what drives them. For example in the payday loan niche the 24 year old male is going to have different questions, problems and concerns than the middle aged family man.

Keyword research aint going to help you out there but once you understand all of that - they might as well just hand over their credit card and be done with it.

MatthewWoodward said:

The only problem is most e-commerce stores are setup like self service checkouts in supermarkets. Really cold and isolated in the fact you walk in, get molested with offers, walk around, pick up what you want, check it out yourself, bag it up yourself and walk out the store with no interaction of any kind - the name of the store is irrelevant.


Obviously that is a very simple view of it, in order to do points 1 and 2 we need to understand the different segments of our audience and what drives them. For example in the payday loan niche the 24 year old male is going to have different questions, problems and concerns than the middle aged family man.

Keyword research aint going to help you out there but once you understand all of that - they might as well just hand over their credit card and be done with it.

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I simplified it and it is based on scientific research from here - http://www.marketingexperiments.com...on/optimizing-landing-pages-increase-148.html. They have loads of very useful videos.

Motive it isn't just a keyword it is a profile of a visitor and value proposition has to be adjusted to this profile. Engage = value proposition.
Build trust/relationship adds value and decreases anxiety. And then you can sell.

moonlighsunligh said:

I simplified it and it is based on scientific research from here - http://www.marketingexperiments.com...on/optimizing-landing-pages-increase-148.html. They have loads of very useful videos.

Motive it isn't just a keyword it is a profile of a visitor and value proposition has to be adjusted to this profile. Engage = value proposition.
Build trust/relationship adds value and decreases anxiety. And then you can sell.

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Yes that is a great site! There aren't many of them around that go into the depth they do.

I know what you mean about motive now - basically we said the same thing worded differently lol

Killix said:

So i was curious if anyone had done a case study on this. No backlinks nothing just content posted to a website on a regular basis?

Thanks.

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In some niches - yes - In most no

Sites with high authority can rank with new keywords quickly and withm minimal links to the specific URL that that keyword is on. They use the authority that is already present on the site and transfer some of that to the new URL and this allows it to rank with minimal linking.

However - to gain that authority in the first place, the whole site will have required links.
The other scenario is where the niche has veryt few sites with appropriate links as competition. In which case "zero links versus zero links" is a draw, and the tie break to see which site ranks is the site quality and content.

Scritty

John Moore said:

Yes! If the page is well optimized for the keyword, the domain has some authority and there is little link competition.

For example this page ranks #1 for the keyword "ranking a website purely on content" and has no links coming to it, why? well it's optimized for that keyword, has little competition and is on an authority site.

SEO isn't hard, it's competition that makes it hard...

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Nice site

I may be slightly late in the discussion but just wanted to say that I'm doing this exactly as a side project. I've been trying to post a unique and quality article every day and just leaving it.

What I've seen is that it's very very easy to rank low competition keywords without any backlinking. I say this because I've only been doing this like a month but one of my keywords is #1 and several others are in the top 10!

Another advice I would give is that check on analytics through what search terms you're visitors are coming from and then make a unique article for that search term/keyword!

MatthewWoodward said:

Actually yes my blog is live case study of this right now - http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/google-webmaster-guidelines-experiment/

I decided to play purely by the webmaster guidelines for a change and in 5 months the blog has earnt $35,000 and secured a range of number 1 rankings including 'buy seo'

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Matthew, you're a nice guy and provide a lot to the community - and the community obviously gives something back and I congratulate you for your success, and yes, maybe I'm even a little jealous

Anywho, I kind of doubt that you did not build links at all. I was curious and checked on ahrefs where you have over 9k d0f0llows. I think your backlink strategy is just different from what people in the community think of it. You put links in the places where they belong, where you may really get traffic. For example, look above, you posted a link to your blog. Also in your youtube channel (really great work there) you link yourself.

So, I don't want to be offensive, but its a little bit of understatement if you say you did not build links

What does this mean for this thread? There is no clear correlation because I have yet to see an ordinary website that ranks without SEO. In my oppinion it is impossible to rank without links. That's it - if those links were build by others or you doesn't matter.

Scritty - I can see that you take a similar approach with your most public site we all know and love (out of interest, you make good bank from that?) You've got to be the #1 affiliate surely?

Stufferizer said:

Matthew, you're a nice guy and provide a lot to the community - and the community obviously gives something back and I congratulate you for your success, and yes, maybe I'm even a little jealous

Anywho, I kind of doubt that you did not build links at all. I was curious and checked on ahrefs where you have over 9k d0f0llows. I think your backlink strategy is just different from what people in the community think of it. You put links in the places where they belong, where you may really get traffic. For example, look above, you posted a link to your blog. Also in your youtube channel (really great work there) you link yourself.

So, I don't want to be offensive, but its a little bit of understatement if you say you did not build links

What does this mean for this thread? There is no clear correlation because I have yet to see an ordinary website that ranks without SEO. In my oppinion it is impossible to rank without links. That's it - if those links were build by others or you doesn't matter.

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Hi Stufferizer,

Yes your statement is correct - there are links to my posts that I have created on forums.

HOWEVER 99% of these links all come from 3 domains/IPs which is this forum and 2 others so the links themselves that I create on these forums are next to worthless.

Any other links you see - have being created by people sharing my content. Basically if they aren't from this forum or 2 others, then I did not create them

My site now has 'authority' power - I published my BuzzBundle review and its on the first page (no link building) and that is in both google UK and USA (bear in mind my domain is a .co.uk).

But what that page does have, is social signals, engagement, a low bounce rate, and a high time on page, a video with good engagement rate/youtube stats/time watched etc

Exactly the same for 'seo powersuite review'

So while yes you are correct to say in one way I have created links - its actually impossible to drive any traffic without creating some kind of link in one way or another.

The only way I can mitigate that is by sticking to my 3 favorite forums so the links have a diminishing effect.

But I spend absolutely no time creating links or link building if that makes sense. I publish high quality content, publish to social media and then drop the posts in my signature.

days are over since mind 2011 to rank great content only with no or close to no good backlinks.... I experienced that on some sites...

darulez said:

days are over since mind 2011 to rank great content only with no or close to no good backlinks.... I experienced that on some sites...

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Well thats not exactly true - you can still rank junk sites with blog networks links. Its just that now they dont rank for as long as they used too ^^

Scritty and Matthew on the same thread, love it like a UFC main event.