For years now, we've heard the drumbeat from Google that marketers should stop focusing on building links. While it's accepted wisdom that you should avoid manipulative link building to rank higher in search results, the popular narrative would have us believe that external links aren't important in Google's ranking algorithms at all, and that link building can be safely ignored.
Is there any truth to this?
To find out, we mined new information from our upcoming biannual ranking correlation study, conducted by Moz's scientist, Dr. Matthew Peters.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link
Moz's study examined the top 50 Google search results for approximately 15,000 keywords. This allowed us to examine not only what factors correlate with higher search rankings, but also how frequently those characteristics are seen.
At this point I must insert the usual caveat that correlation is not causation. Simply because a feature is strongly related to high rankings, this doesn't prove or disprove that Google actually uses it in its algorithm. That said, it sure is a hint!
The relationship between external links and rankings
When we look at what the study found about links, we find a strong relationship.
The correlation between higher rankings and the number of linking websites (root domains) sits at .30. This number seems small, but it's actually one of the highest correlations the study found. (Smaller correlations are also not surprising—with over 200 ranking signals, Google specifically designed their algorithm so that one factor doesn't dominate the others.)
Even more telling is the number of websites we found in the top results that had external backlinks, or rather, the lack thereof.
Out of the top results, a full 99.2% of all websites had at least one external link. (The remaining .8% is well within the margin of error expected between Mozscape and Google's own link index.) The study found almost no websites ranking for competitive search phrases that didn't have at least a single external link pointing at them, and most had significantly more links.
In other words, if you're looking for a site that ranks well with no external links, be prepared to look for a very long time.
That said, the study did find numerous examples where individual pages ranked just fine without specific external links, as long as the website itself had external links pointing at it. For example, consider when The New York Times publishes a new page. Because it's new, it has no external links yet. But because The New York Times' website itself has tons of external links, it's possible for the new page to rank.
In all, 77.8% of individual pages in the top results had at least one external link from another site, which means 22.2% of individual pages ranked with no external links.
What the data says about links and Google rankings
There are a number of conclusions you can reasonably draw from these numbers.
1. External links are almost always present for competitive searches
If you want to rank for anything that's even remotely competitive, the chances of finding a website ranking without external links is very rare indeed.
2. It's possible to rank individual pages without links
As long as your website itself is linked externally, it appears more than possible to rank individual pages on your site, even if those pages themselves don't have external links. That said, there's a strong relationship between links to a page, and that pages performance in search—so it's much better if the page actually does have external links.
To put this in layman's terms, if a lot of people link to your website homepage, it's possible for other pages to rank as well, but it's even better if those pages also have external links pointing at them.
Although not examined in this study, it's likely most of the pages without external links at least had internal links pointing at them. While not as strong as an external link, internal links remain a decent way to pass authority, relevancy and popularity signals to pages on the same site.
3. More links correlate with higher rankings
It seems obvious, but the study confirmed the long-standing correlation between higher rankings and the number of external links found from unique websites.
Indeed, out of all the data points the ranking correlation study looked at, the number of unique websites linking to a page was one of the highest correlated relationships we found.
4. When can you rank without links?
Despite the fact that we found almost no websites ranking without external links, it is still possible?
Absolutely, but there's a catch.
The 15,000 keyword phrases used in this study were, for the most part, competitive. This means that lots of other people and websites are trying to rank for the same term. Think of phrases like "Galaxy s6" and "New York car insurance."
Non-competitive phrases, by their nature, are much easier to rank for. So if you want your website to rank without obtaining any backlinks, you might succeed by targeting more obscure phrases like "Oregon beekeeper ballet emporium" or "Batman flux platypus." These phrases have much lower competition, and by default, much lower traffic (and in many cases, none.)
There are other edge cases where it's possible to rank without links, such as when the user is searching for your website specifically, or when you offer something very unique that can't be found anywhere else. Even in these cases, it helps tremendously to actually have links pointing at you.
Proceed with caution
There's good reason people believe link building is dead, as readers of this blog know well. For readers less familiar with this concept, or those newer to SEO...
A link isn't always a link.
In the past 10 years, after people spammed the heck out of link building to gain higher rankings, Google began cracking down in a serious way starting in 2012. First with its Penguin algorithm, then by de-indexing several link networks, and then by cracking down on guest blogging.
Today, even slight deviations from Google's guidelines on manipulative links can land webmasters in penalty jail.
The web is filled with links. Billions of them. Many are built by robots, some are paid for by advertisers, some are good old fashioned editorial links. The challenge for Google is to separate the good from the bad in its ranking algorithm.
When Google finds a link pointing at your website, it can choose to do one of 3 things:
- Count it in its ranking algorithm
- Ignore it - or not give it any weight in boosting your rankings
- Penalize you - if it thinks the link is manipulative
In fact, most people would be surprised to learn how many links don't actually help you to rank, or can actually hurt. To play within Google's good graces, it's best to understand Google's guidelines on manipulative link building, and knowing what types of links to avoid. You can analyze any site's Spam Score using Open Site Explorer.
The safest link building is simply link earning, and to get your content in front of the right people.
But trying to rank in Google without any links at all?
Fuhgeddaboudit.
Photo Credit: Geographically Accurate Paris Metro Map by Nojhan under Creative Common License
Such notice of webmaster tools I have very recently ...
While we all agree that it’s kind of naive to think that links don’t matter anymore, this large-scale experiment is a great reminder that things are the same as of mid-2015. So thanks!
I remember that statement by John Mueller, but we all know why he said that. Google keeps the links factor because it’s the best possible indicator for authority. And they want us to avoid it, because it makes their lives much harder.
The thing is, even marketers/SEOs who didn’t have anything to worry about before, now need to constantly check their sites’ link profiles, at least at some level, simply because the risk is now too big.
So agencies now need to explain to each of their clients—repeatedly—what differentiates good links from bad ones, and why it's so important.
But from an in-house SEO perspective, things aren’t much easier either. Not only that we still need to control the link profile constantly to see what others create for us, we also need to make sure that our own employees (from other departments) don’t screw things up. Just last week I dealt with a new biz dev employee who, innocently, closed a deal that ended up getting us a link from a penalized, spammy network.
Individual pages without external links: We have the same site in 25 languages. And I see how Google treats completely new pages over and over again. In almost all cases, we begin seeing some rankings (within the first 5 results pages) for a new page within weeks without any external links.
But with competitive phrases, there’s always a limit to how far the internal links can take us. Then, the PR team does its magic, which in the end leads to quality links, and only then we see the significant boost in these rankings.
We launch these pages at the same time on all of our languages, and we keep seeing better rankings with internal links only, according to how competitive the market is in each country.
So if for example a new page can only take us up to the 11th position in the US with internal links only, we would at the same time usually rank around 1-5 in less competitive languages such as Turkish, Spanish, Russian, or Hebrew.
Cyrus, you've mentioned the number of unique websites linking. But I’m curious; did you see any impact from getting more than a single link from each root domain?
Great question. It's really, really hard to measure the influence of additional links from the same domain/subdomain, but our research does tell us that additional links form the same subdomain are not as highly correlated with rankings as and increase in the # of unique linking root domains.
Thanks Cyrus,
While I totally agree with that, and SEOs always want to see more root domains linking (rather than the total number of backlinks), here are two quick examples which make me think that additional links from the same domains must have some level of impact:
1. One link from NYTimes from 2010, and now a 2nd - fresh link in 2015.
2. Another editorial link from a very high authority site. Linked to us once in a single story, comparing to multiple journalists mentioning and linking to us on a regular basis.
Just something to think about.
Thanks for this post Cyrus, very interesting. I have been listening for months that the linkbuilding will stop being taken into account by Google, and I think a good idea. I've focused on creating quality content on my site, but today few external link that I have on my website I think have contributed much more in my position that the content Google.
If someone here remember about Backrub. Then he already knows that links is essential part of SEO and ranking. Internal page can rank without links in case if domain is old and trusted like WhiteHouse.gov or Stanford.edu.
I'll attach here original Backrub document https://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html where you can see:
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at https://google.stanford.edu/
Definitely agree with you Cyrus...
...but what I would say is that an SEO campaign doesn't need to acquire new links in order to drive rankings.
You're unlikely to rank a site on content alone, but at the same time lack of links isn't always the reason your site isn't ranking well.
Exactly. With 100s of ranking signals and inputs in Google's algorithm, there are many (and oftentimes better) levers for SEOs to pull in order to influence search rankings.
On the other hand, when you think about all the signals a search engine can interpret from a single link, the list is pretty amazing;
It would seem that links are so foundational to core ranking signals that it makes it a very important lever to exist, sooner rather than later!
I like this analogy about pulling levers for SEO. That's as it should be - links are one piece, or one lever. Pull that one too hard and you have trouble. Pull almost any SEO lever too hard and things go backward. It's an interesting 'game' we play ... very complex and as you say, plenty of ways to affect outcomes.
Congratulations on the job. The study seems fairly complete . It has long heard that content is king. More recently , it can also read and hear that the CTR is the new king . Certainly , they are very important but linkbuilding continues to weigh much, much.
Hi Cyrus,
In addition to your last key sentence mentioning link earning, SEO's should view links as opportunities to increase referral channels and the targeted visitors they'll bring. As NorthCutt wonderfully said "Would you build this link if you knew for a fact that it would have no direct impact on search results?”
If the link matches relevancy and helps visitors, Google will view the link as part of the users search journey. If visitors stay, dwell time then becomes a contributory factor in helping the page / site rank, especially through engagement (as you stated in point 1 of the dwell time post).
Well said!
As an SEO blogger (and as a content producer here at Moz) its a very hard line to walk reporting these numbers as people will tend to misinterpret them. When you focus on one thing (links) some folks will narrowly assume that one thing is all they need to focus on. Wish there was a way to easily discuss all the other ramifications every time we discussed a single factor, without going into a 100,000 word essay :)
Great research Cyrus,
Yes, you're absolutely right that it's not possible to rank a website without links but i think not in all cases. I saw many new websites ranks great in SERP's without having any links profile. even I have a client and he has a news based website with more than 5K daily. he's not building any links for his website but updating his site with latest trends and stories and his articles ranks very well in SERP and more than 70% of traffic coming to his website is from search engines. so I think if we're writing on non competitive (as you said above) or on latest trends then we can get a good position for our articles in SERP.
Thanks..
Gaurav Heera
Hi Gurav and Dr. Matthew Peters, when I was at a recent conference I met the head of SEO at a large news media publication. She said that everytime they post a new news article they get picked up and get ranked at the top of Google Serps, because they applied to, and got qualified for a Google News Site and generate an additional sitemap (a news .xml sitemap) that Google crawls and places those new articles at the top for a few days to be able to serve up Google visitors with most recent news. Dr. Peters, did you accomodate for the news xml sitemap in your test? You and Gurav mentioned a news outlet site that was able to rank without links to it. Were there any other sites/pages - outside of the news industry - that were able to be ranked without backlinks?
Great question! Couple of points:
1. The study looked at regular search results, and to my knowledge did not include specialized verticals such as News, Images, Video, etc, unless they were a regular part of the SERP.
2. Although the study did not take Google News indexation into consideration, I would surmise that the same general principal applies to news results, i.e. individual stories likely have no established backlinks, but rank well based on freshness factors and domain authority, while it's very, very likely that the host subdomain has a history of extablished, trustworthy backlinks.
Just to add something about Google news, we see a direct correlation between the things we rank well for with our static pages, and the news of the same topics on Google News.
You submit each of the news sections separately to Google News, and the interesting thing is that once we started adding more news to a specific topic, we saw a direct - positive impact, on the rankings of the relevant - static pages as well.
At the same time, I have to be honest that it’s a bit hard to say if it’s mainly due to the internal links from the news to the static pages, or if appearing on Google News actually has a positive impact on the general authority of the site for a specific topic. Both make sense to me.
Hi Igal,
I just seen this comment - I am actually doing some research on the impact which Google News could have SEOwise - could you please share some data with me? Thanks [email protected]
I don't think i ever got the impression that the importance of links was somehow diminishing, it almost feels the opposite, because the type of links that will do our sites good are becoming few and far between but are also by virtue of this becoming much more valuable. Link building as a direct effort ('i go find a place for a link and i request it') is certainly disappearing, link building is becoming more a matter of creating things that will encourage links. So you create revelant, quality content/info/videos/news that motivates people to link to and share it, and you're on to a winner. In some cases you can also give a nudge to someone who might already want to link but hasn't thought of it (as in posting a testimonial or blog review, but didn't get around to it yet).
Our job becomes more to guide customers to focus on high quality content, quality over quantity, create site-user relationships and connections, and to examine user preferences and behaviour to create more of the stuff that works to bring in links.
Easier said than done!
I've been performing SEO and designing websites for over 10 years and without high quality backlinks from PR5 to PR9 sites, chances of obtaining a good SERP is almost impossible. Social media, social bookmarks, local directories and classifieds are the best places for backlinks. Writing original engaging content with anchor text links to your website on these social media sites seems to work best for me. I've got customers on page one of Google searches within 2 months using this method.
Cyrus, I appreciate this on so many levels. When we educate clients on the need for authority/credibility signals, its always in relation to the competition of the campaign we are looking at. Local campaigns can get some traction with good on-site structure and content, infused with local citations and local links generated by being active in a community. As the competitiveness increases, so does the collective needs for authority, credibility, content, influence, etc. I'm still surprised by local businesses that come to us with ranking issues tied to penguin because of someone "building" thousands of links the wrong way. We end up removing and cleaning up hundreds or thousands of spammy links, and creating only a handful of good link opportunities. That seems backwards to non-SEOs because we undo a lot of previous SEO work, but you can't refute results. I'm bookmarking this one to help strengthen my case :)
Thanks Cyrus for such a detailed finding.
I would say link building can never be dead, but indeed its like walking on a thin rope. If you walk straight, you survive. The fact is any online marketer would never ever miss an opportunity of linking with a high PR site. But the problem is that we often tend to overlook the relevancy of the links which I believe is very important.
Instead of link building for achieving rankings, I believe improving your CTR is much more important. What are your views on this.
On the other hand instead of link building I believe more and more people are moving towards content marketing. This is I believe a is big shift in SEO. People find it more safe to increase the traffic and also the rankings by generating content and disseminating via social media networks. Creating linking via content generation is I think a good technique.
Cyrus, thanks for the wonderful post -- as always!
My personal hope is that this essay will do two things:
1. Dispel any rumors that "links don't matter anymore" -- because, of course, they still do and will do for the foreseeable future.
2. Remind people that any direct attempts to influence Google's rankings artificially will end in disaster.
By now, in 2015, I hope that SEOs can agree that the best backlink profiles consist of links:
- That come from relevant, authoritative websites in one's industry
- That have a natural distribution of anchor text
- That come from sites with a natural distribution of Domain Authority
- That are editorial-based links within the text of content
- That have a natural distribution of follow and no-follow
And that being the case, we need to stop thinking about links directly and realize that the best backlink profiles come simply as by-products of doing good marketing and PR.
Fixing broken links, orphan links, non-linked brand mentions & old-domain redirects should be included too. None of these relate to PR but all can have a positive effect on traffic and rankings.
All these require thinking about direct links. If these are ignored the SEO isn't doing their due-diligence & helping the client (or their own site).
I agree, but addressing broken links, orphan links, and old-domain redirects are one-off tactics that cannot be applied in any ongoing, scalable context.
It all comes down to the economic principle of opportunity cost. Time spent A is time spent not doing B. If I have ten hours to spend on links, I'd argue that ten hours spent on a PR campaign will usually deliver more ROI then ten hours spent on those things in any ongoing basis.
A few years ago, while checking for broken links after a site migration, I found a link that had previously linked to their old domain as a mention (the sites owner forget to add //). The site with a broken link was a huge US provider of party supplies & novelties. The migrated site was a key UK player in the same market.
The link was made live after 15 minutes of emailing back and forth (the site owner thanked me for helping his users now have the option of a UK provider).
During the next month, the link brought £4,800 worth of referral orders. The month after that referral orders resulted in another £3,200. That's £8k worth of orders for products costing between £1 & £5 each.
Do you think I chose the right opportunity?
An SEO's tasks should include (certainly for larger sites) looking for opps that have been created by human error as part of continuous work being carried out.
Referral traffic can be a huge way to increase ROI, that doesn't depend on 10 man hours worth of PR campaigns.
I'm not saying either / or. What I am saying is don't dismiss link building work - for connecting broken links to their mother site is "building" their connection back ;)
All in all, the study has confirmed that you still want to get links to your website from as many other domains trusted by Google as you can. Besides, you want to make sure your internal link structure is perfect.
Link building is alive and well, despite the worries some people have or the propaganda some marketers push. I think some marketers want to kill link building because it is hard and they are not good at it.
When you say "link building" is alive and well, what precisely do you mean by "linkbuilding"? The nuance lies in how one defines and applies the term.
Definitely Cyrus, Links are important, And yes if the domain has enough good back links, new pages will rank automatically. However still think Quality Content matters a lot than back links. for e.g. For Most of the general search, Wikipedia ranks on the first page, its because of its content not because of links. similarly for any shopping terms Amazon ranks well. Let's wait and see, how ranking algorithm changes in the future. :)
I agree with all that you've written, external links ARE still important for SERP. I've always looked at SEO in a holistic manner.
Yes, yes, external links are still important. But...
Thanks for starting a great discussion
Congrats for this article, I've never seen this data before. I think linkbuilding is one of the most difficult part of SEO and it is always a mystery
Great stats Cyrus....From these numbers you will surely gonna hold the earnings of those SEO agency who just going on through Link Building and Clients are paying them a good amount. LoL :)
Link Building is a rich asset of Inbound marketing.... I can never expect any change in SERP without it. By the way thanks for supporting my views at last in the post.
"But trying to rank in Google without any links at all?"
Fuhgeddaboudit. Forget about it......
I agree with you but good content is also matter. I work at Papira doing content, if the content is good and you get natural link to it, for sure google will rank it.
Strong post! I like the courage to say the obvious, you're not going to rank period without external links pointing back at you. Now for the fun part....playing somewhat of a guessing game. Obviously, Page Rank is a thing of the past so we must rely on a site's domain authority in determining how hard to pursue that site. Thank goodness for Moz and other free tools that allow the webmaster the ability to check out a site when determining where to go with its link building process. That said, I've seen several site, especially older ones, with great DA's (like in the mid 80's) that are laden with what have become bad links; however, some way they are able to maintain their domain authority for the most part even after disavowing the bad links.
Getting a solid link on a high DA authoritative site (without baggage) is next to impossible unless you're able to show relevancy, a good site from your side, and great engaging content on your website. Then, if you're lucky to impress the editor of the site you're hoping to receive a link from, your rankings will benefit. Also, don't worry if you think you're acquiring to many nofollow links ... they count too; they have to with panda / penguin because most webmaster are scared to make a lot of links dofollow. There may come a day when all that's left is nofollow, so in essence, it's entirely possible that the algorithm will reconfigure the way that all backlinks are weighed.
Hi Cyrus,
Even Googler John Muller mentioned on one of Webmasters office hours HOA that links are not important anymore and a site can even rank if it doesn't resort to link building. The two best points that your brought up from Dr, Pete analysis is once can rank only for rare search phrases for no links and link is something to earn rather than to build. Link flow should definitely be natural. The more you contribute to the knowledge pool, the more people would follow and share your content and links would ultimately follow. Can you also please do some research on how social shares influences link building and authority of website? I'm sure, you guys might have already been analyzing it. Although a lot of analysis has been done by Eric Enge, but still I wanted to see what Dr. Pete and you come up with for Twitter, Google plus and other platforms. Thanks!
Hi Amit,
Quick heads-up (and to set the record straight): John did not say that links are not important any more or that "a site can even rank if it doesn't resort to link building". On the contrary, John stated that links are still a part of Google's algo but that Google also use lot of other factors as well.. see John Mueller's exact comment here.
NorthCutt posted an excellent write-up of the FUD surrounding links, in particular the way Google can confuse people with comments, here.
Thanks Tony for the link and added explanation. My another query is, if Google biases search results for brands, what opportunities exist for content pushers to rank better than them in Google?
Niche authority. Own it ;)
+1 Everything Tony said.
RE: Social Shares. We have been analyzing/gathering data and will release results in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned.
Thanks Cyrus!! Awaiting Dr. Pete and your analysis on social channels.
This is a very interesting post, knowing how to rank without backlink is a very valuable skill. While backlinks are still extremely important (and probably will be for at least several more years).
No dough external links have its vital role in ranking. The sample size was good enough to determine these results.
Great post Cyrus Shepard, I am pretty much convinced with theory of relationship between google and back linking, people sometimes tries to create unnecessary backlinks for which they spam on the other good sites and get reported after sometime.
Used to be a time when site owners could throw a bunch of links up from the same source, get a PR 7 and sell their site a year later for $10k. Those days are long gone! Now it takes lots more to understand ways to generate reputable traffic by learning from sites like https://www.trafficexplained.com Simple links and keywords just don't do it any more. It takes a very strong internet presence with great content that people wish to constantly come back to every day like youtube and facebook. Kind of sites that people may get "addicted" to. Haha Great article though. Our developers at https://www.barbrickdesign.com really liked it in our meeting today.
That's true !!
Cyrus - great post! I'm always interested how link building works as part of the overall marketing strategy. Some say it's the end-all and be-all and some say it's yesterday's news.
One of the projects we're working on (SEO) is for a client who is in a very competitive niche. We did our competitor research and the thing that separates the top competitors (there just a few companies that dominate the market) and the rest of the pack is backlinks.
Most the my clients competitors have average sites, not spectacular content and no social media (not appropriate for this market) and no email outreach (you wonder how they get business!)
But what they do have is great backlinks from .edu, .gov and very high authority sites. The link building for these top competitors looks very natural and organic.
Start with great content and then actively get relevant backlinks. Your post has given me some great tips and insights for the job going forward!
Thanks!
Its not an easy task to get higher ranking in search engines without back links. It may be possible for low competitive keywords but its impossible for the keywords where there are thousands of competitor websites promoting same thing as you. At least some good links are necesary.
HTTPS, mobile friendly, in-depth original content, rich media, schema, social media = still need links.
My experience is, still: quantity overy quality. And that's a pitty :(
A while back I set up a test website to see if I could rank on content alone (it was on the same niche as my main website, so I had a bench mark). It did get traffic, but only very long tails. It didn't rank for any competitive keywords at all. Its only a sample of 1, but I agree that links still matter!
Thanks Cyrus, I have also seen some of individual pages that rank on top without any external link and try to understand how it happened. But after reading this post it clarified and now I understand how it possible!
I did initially start my website where I was linking out to a lot of high authoritative websites like Google, Microsoft etc. But i did not get any organic traffic. But after blog commenting and guest posting on moderately authorative sites, I started getting moderate traffic, like 16-30 organic hits per day from the 3rd month onwards. But I never got any large traffic like many of the SEO so called experts claims. So, maybe it is true that you need to have backlinks from high authorative sites to rank high in google.
thats such a helpful and hopeful article
My competitor has managed it, but only for 1 keyword.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=hammock+chair
Look for BuyHammocksOnline.com.au around rank 2-3.
Their domain has 1-2 backlinks, and the category page has none.
My website, HeavenlyHammocks.com.au is down at rank 12.
My domain has 50 or so referring domains and roughly 0 links to this category page.
I'm not sure what the issue here is, but it's my homepage showing at #12, not my category page, so that's a hint.
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0.30 is a very low correlation, you generally want .80 to determine if the correlation is a candidate for causation. Since we know Google tags links with different values, and also demotes or devalues links with the new and improved Penguin update, it's not surprising that I see websites with 6 backlinks ranking ahead of websites with over 200 in the SERP. I don't think we can use tests this basic to determine what Google is up to anymore. I'd like to see an updated version of this test for 2017 with a more comprehensive set of criteria, perhaps pairing external links with internal links, or length of content, or determining the value of a link in a footer as compared to the body, etc.
If we could do that we might be able to come up with a higher correlation than 0.30.
Does enough link building from content marketing text or must do on link building
"But trying to rank in Google without any links at all?" Absolutely not possible. I have seen websites with so many unique articles that only have 2/3 viewers a day.
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Hey Cyrus!! Thanks for sharing the post. For me SEO is like an addiction. We have to performed SEO on regular basis. I don't think without links you can rank on Google.
Great analysis and emphasis on the keyword analysis. Method Man approach is interesting. Thanks
presently, backlinks withoutthe spammy obvious footprint still plays the important factor to tank up for medium competition up. did some simple tests. 2 new websites, 1 with backlinks, the other no backlink but with more detail onsite seo. Guess who rank higher? the answer is obvious. now, backlink still rules
Let's say one website had a 10,000 re-tweets and 10,000 facebook shares within 24 hours. Simple words. when a website goes viral. it will rank on top. How do we explain this?
Thanks
Don Hesh
I just read an article about how Google doesn't consider links at all nowadays and that links - good or bad - have no effect on your ranking in SERPs.
Is there truth in this? That content is the key and the mention of backlinks is merely a smokescreen?
Hiii great post Cyrus, I have avoid link building but results take long time to get on first page, but they are more stable comparison to results those come with link building. I have work for some of high competition keywords before one year ago and now they are on first page, even I don't have updated the sites from long time.
I think building link to your website is very helpful but with rules. So Yes: it's good to have a quality back-links to your website.
There is slight sway on the figures by the fact that Google uses the presence of links to index sites, as well as rank them. If a site has no links and has not been manually entered into Webmaster Tools it won't be indexed and so won't rank.
Marcus Tober from Searchmetrics has a different take on this with his study. So, may Disraeli was right and that there are lies, damn lies and then statistics? Our studies tells us what we want to know when we start. Samuel nailed it, PR is legacy code that has been patched repeatedly. Sugerrae reminds us that Google is not an unimpeachable source of information on how things work. Academia laughs at our studies because they lack scientific vigor. Users tell us what they want by their behavior. Sigh...user experience seems to be the order of the day for now.
Hmmm.. I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying the data is incorrect? Or if it's the analysis, is there a particular point you think has been interpreted incorrectly?
Also, I presented most of this data with Marcus Tober last week at SMX advanced. While I'm sure he may have his own opinion as to what this data means, let me know if you have a link or source to what you are referring to.
Cheers!
Can You Rank in Google Without Links? Yes, we can Cyrus. Ok, some people may think this IS the main ranking factor above others (even more importantes) like: content, cross-linking, domain authority, and many more! But, why search for 'back links' if you don't need it? I don't search on links... because my customers are the most importante.
This experiment really missed the audience, purpose, and in my completely honest opinion, wasted the time of very talented and knowledgeable people that could have otherwise been investing their efforts in creating new, thought-provoking content that falls inline with what Moz as a company has been championing; creating innovative and great content.
Don't get me wrong, I've fallen into the same trap and done the same things. I'm just giving some honest feedback. In fact, to be proactive, here's a subject that I'd love to see covered: "How does link value degrade (or gain) in value as the SERP approaches certain ranking milestones?" ... In fact, I'll even volunteer to work with you to find out. Message me if you need / want me to explain more on my theory.
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your thoughts. Obviously I disagree, otherwise I wouldn't have written this post :) Why?
Regardless, as a talented and knowledgeable marketer, you might have perhaps found this information obvious and therefore, a waste of your time. If only we could say the same for everyone!
That said, love your idea and would very much like to see you write a post on your theory of link value degrading with ranking milestones! Let us know if you publish it, or would be interested in submitting it to YouMoz.
Cheers!
thanks for the data
i will use for my site.
There is ranking on page 50 and then there is first page RANKING. There are competitive keywords and there are COMPETITIVE keywords. The latter two will need good quality links. Links are a commodity nothing more nothing less. Link value (the quality of the link assigned by Google at any given time) and availability of links or is that to link? (Your effort) goes up and down over time.
You can even cheat the link building system and you can win until you get caught.
Links will always be important UNTIL a new technology comes along
I agree. It is possible however to increase rank of a a web page and in fact increase rankings and overall traffic of a website just by proper on-page SEO and technical SEO (Implementing canonical urls, redirects, etc) if the site has some natural links.
This concept of requiring links but not building them is very hard to explain to people who aren't familiar with the recent Google changes, I always simplify it to don't build links.
The most success that I have ever attracted is still by producing content that has some value and advertising it to people who might find it useful. I think this is harder for commercial entities as they find it hard to justify this speculative approach (you might literally get zero return on interest), try to remind them that this feeds into growing the brand, growing awareness and hopefully improving the receptivity of your audience for your next piece of content.
Hey Richard,
Regarding commercial entities and justifying content strategy, a way I explain this is through positive sentiment (aka a good "well done" slap on the back):
If someone is really happy with your product service, hopefully they'll leave a review (Google or other).
if someone finds your social commentary insightful and engaging, hopefully they'll follow you or RT your posts.
If someone finds your content super-useful and it answers (well) their question(s), hopefully they'll link to it.
All the above are forms of marketing. So IMO your approach with your clients is right on the money. I would also say that creating situations where content is read / shared or finding communities to amplify the content (if it does indeed kick butt) is where we need to excel. And this includes creating and sharing content where links are a good possibility ..
Tony,
I so wish companies got this. The points you make in your comment are what I don't see AND get frustrated by daily. It's the little things that add up to the big things businesses care about, but they don't do them consistently enough to see results.
RS
Hey Ronell,
Crazy huh?! Our aim is to change the mindset businesses have and get them to invest in these activities, much the same way they view newsletters, using the telephone and making sales calls.
This is the knowledge gap that exists between what we do daily and what they should do too. Bridging that gap takes education from the board level down. If a CEO or director "gets it", will employees say "no"? If they want a salary, then off course not.
Therefore, it's those (at the top) who we need to help understand this and, if need be, show them competitor success to drive home the point.
We're in this fight together. Not always clear who is winning, though :)
Sadly I have run into situations where despite repeatedly explaining the benefits and the necessity (even pointing to results!) they still didn't get it and were happy to pour there efforts into huge campaigns that were always going to fall short of their potential.
This is one of the reasons I prefer the technical side of SEO, I can physically point at something and say, this is wrong fix it or your content won't get seen.
Yes!
I believe in the concept of "serendipitous" link building (loosely borrowed from a phrase Rand uses). When generosity and awesomeness are practiced for their own sake, and not for the sole purpose of obtaining links, the energy is returned to you 10x.
Where people get in trouble are activities where 100% of input is meant to deliver 100% ROI in terms of links earned. When links are your only goal, you'll get what you set out for, but the return somehow won't be as great.
Hey Cyrus,
Fantastic research!
Was there any pattern in the % of break up between do-follow and no-follow link with the top 50 websites? (For example, 30% do-follow)
Cheers! :)
We didn't study ratios of follow/nofollow, but we did study the overall presense of nofollow. We'll publish those results soon!
The first moz post i read in my phone completly and the fist mobile comment. It would be hard to find a domain without links, i think. Nearly everybody did linkbuilding once. Some More, some less. And there are tons oft links we get by pages and bots. The interesting part here are the pages with links and how they are ranking. Sorry for wrong words and capital letters ... German keyboard :)
Suppose Google start giving less importance to backlinks, then what will be the KPIS that will help to rank your website
Cyrus what about the pages with mammoth of social shares, I have seen social shares complimenting pages like backlinks, what is your take on social shares with respect to ranking?
There's a high correlation between social shares and links (i.e. pages that earn lots of shares also tend to earn links). Buzzsumo recently did some excellent research on this.
Indeed, Moz's own research shows a high correlation between social shares and rankings, but it's doubtful Google uses social shares directly in its search results, if for no other reason that they tell us this much.
Also, Mark Traphagen did an excellent writeup on this subject, which I totally agree with: https://www.stonetemple.com/googles-matt-cutts-understanding-social-identity-on-the-web-is-hard/
That's a great article by Mark, so the point is still the social shares can influence your rankings but indirectly by giving you more exposure and that can be in the form of backlink too.
Interesting study
"More links correlate with higher rankings" do you have anymore data on that?
And wouldn't it be possible for some internal links to outweigh the significant of an external link under the right circumstances? for instance if a page had a lot of social signals etc and linked internally to a page.
Yes! We will release the full study, including additional link correlation data, in the upcoming weeks.
As to your second point, the answer is absolutely. Many external links likely don't count at all, and it's more than possible for internal links to pass the needed amount of relevency signals in certain circumstances.
Great post Cyrus, please keep on sharing those findings. I am not sure how many agencies will be able to afford a proper, profitable and scalable Link-building service. But it definitely has become a more complex task. Nowadays you can not achieve good results if you don't have the technology (or the knowledge to use the technology) and the right philosophy behind an efficient results-driven strategy.
Thanks for the wonderful post
I went through different case studies about ranking on google with our any backlinks in the past. Some were based on on the power of social shares and some were based on the quality of the contents ( unique content on a topic with less competition).
"But because The New York Times' website itself has tons of external links, it's possible for the new page to rank." This is what i find very interesting here. Of course, this is going to be really interesting.
Great post Cyrus
:)
Excellent survey Cyrus Shepard, Thank you for sharing with us. Most of the SEOs still believe that link is most important ranking signals. SEO's know but many of them avoiding this. Because now a day link building has become very tough. Google says acquire links not try to build it. It is also not easy to take decision which link will benefit you and which not. Few link building can be a boomerang for you. So may SEO's stopped link building.
But we know good link is the most important for ranking. If you are trying to rank a url for competitive term you must have good external links.
The link from a good site is not the last word; i believe the link position also plays a vital role in ranking. I hope you all understand what i am trying to say.
At last i like to suggest SEO that don't stop thinking about external link. Keep your eye open and capitalize opportunity for good links.
I position the content. I wrote and wrote until I ran out of almost all knowledge. The SERP jumped on site from 1 to 70 or a full spread. After the start of linking the forums I'm already from 1 -30. So it works.
I also agree with that the content really matters. and also the links.. I just wanna ask if how could I start with the link building ? are there steps that i should follow?.. (newbie here) .. hope you can help.
Terrific analysis. Great conversaiton in the comments.
Thanks, for me is the content the most important and the links will be coming!!! Although there are many good inbound link building strategies, there are definitely a few bad ones. Engaging in these tactics can end up getting your site de-indexed from search engines. You should avoid: Automated link building, Paying for links.
thanks For this article
Yes I agree with you but content is also matter.
Of course content matters. Only your best content is able to earn links. Both matters Like about 200 other factors
While reading the title I thought how it possible....but now I think that it's possible
Thank you so much for your great post
Okey, but Gambling SEO is very difficult. I have a online slots directory website.
Spam!
i think google page rank is very important..
What You are talking about? Even if, we don't see value od PR from 5/6 December 2013.
Google has not updated PageRank externally for a long time, and the search engine might never update it. Forget about PageRank -- people should want links on sites that their target audiences read even if the PageRank is 1.
Used to be a time when site owners could throw a bunch of links up from the same source, get a PR 7 and sell their site a year later for $10k. Those days are long gone!