Link Building is terribly overestimated on these forums

Hi, this is only my second post but I've been reading this forum for over a year now.

I noticed every other post people suggest to build links to get better SERPs, and being the type of people that go to forums and desperately ask for help, it's logical to assume many go on spastic periods of link buying.

But is this really required?

I have 9 websites on my network (no names will be mentioned, sorry) all of them were built from scratch without any backlink from anyone, just content, content, content, and of course server stability and 'ageing'.

They all get good traffic in a very competitive niche now, with the smallest getting 27k people per day (and for those who still value the PageRank the highest of them is 3 and most are 0).

I know this won't work for everyone, and every example as an anti example in the word of SEO, but seriously people get a grip and stop being obsessed with buying links and initiating in link exchanges, just focus on your website and your visitors (and Googlebot of course ) and the results will come.

I know many won't believe this but I am speaking from years and years of trial and error (which translates to penalties, bans and all kinds of things you don't wanna see) link building is really not that important as long as Googlebot can find your content just fine.

So go out there, submit your XMLs and update your site as much as possible, and you'll do OK without backlinks.

Google Webmaster Tools shows I have a very small amount of backlinks even after years, because I admit my content isn't the best around in the niche, but hey! at least Google likes it, so basically I've minimal amount of links but lots of sitemap submitting (Which will keep the bot at your pages 24/7).

So If you're about to get involved in all type of link buying / trading etc.. read and think carefully before you do, I'e done it in the past in some of my older sites, and the it really didn't to affect anything,. In fact, there's an increased chance you will get penalized for it, and if not an even greater chance that your SEO success will be based on a 'bubble' of links instead of natural Goolgle 'Love'...

Hope this helps someone save 200$.

 

for low competition sites you can get away without link building, but IMO for high competition niches its a required thing (natural or not) if you wanna rank well.

 

Good to hear it works out for you, but it doesn't work like that for everyone. Maybe people liked your content so much that they linked to you and even though you have only few links, they might come from high authority sites and therefore give some big boost to your sites.
As long as the niche is low in competition, you're optimizing for an obscure keyword or your competitors aren't building links, not building links yourself will work fine.
However, as soon as you have someone else optimizing their site for the same keyword as you AND building links to it, he will outperform you in a matter of weeks.
Also, while your process might work for you, people just don't want to write a ton of content that google loves, or don't want to spend years waiting for their site to "age". Building backlinks speeds up the time it takes for SEO dramatically and therefore it's worth to some people spending a couple hundred bucks so their site starts earning in a matter of a month and not a year.
To each his own though, thanks for sharing your experience

 

funny thing your reading this site for a over a year... whilst your Join Date is Jan 2011???

 

Aight I get it you're a veteran/champ/hero/SEO master etc..

BUT

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define:+join&btnG=Search

Code (markup):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define:+read&btnG=Search

Code (markup):

 

Since you were so kind to give us the definitions of join and read...what exactly are you refering to?
I'm not sure what you're talking about with SEO master, champ, hero, etc...no need to answer in such a huffy way. This is a forum so expect people to disagree with you.

 

@ backlinkexcellence Did you even bother reading the replies?

 

I have a client site which is like the one OP mentioned above. It has less than 45 inbound links and ranks in the Google first page for some high traffic keywords. I learned a thing or two from them.

 

I agree with webcosmo, but not with Giamatti, if that's what you mean.
And congrats johny2006. Just keep in mind that his site could have more than just 45 links, search engines never show all the links and there's quite a bit of misconception about the whole issue with indexing. I can blast high traffic keywords to the top of spot one without showing more than 200 links as "indexed", while in reality it got 100k. Oh and these aren't crap links that get ignored, all sitting on high authority sites that are being crawled several times a day

 

I've seen sites with very few that ranked very highly for competitive keywords for a short period of time. They were then knocked out of the top spots by sites that had good SEO AND backlinks. If your sites are ranking that well and are stable in their rankings then I would be afraid to build backlinks. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Chris

 

Exactly Chris, if there's one place where that rule should apply it's Google I guess... If you're doing OK don't act stupid just chill out and watch your success.

 

you are wrong. Maybe people are linking to you without you asking, but you need links for seo

 

Link building is necessary. Meanwhile I recommend focusing on niche markets where you have little link building to do and where position 1 can be easily reached.

 

PaulMac,

I agree with you at some point. One of my site has some unique content and its SERP is higher.

But how can you get 27K people per day ? How many pages indexed for one website ?

 

It's not impossible to rank without link building, but as other posters have mentioned, either your KWs aren't that competitive -- or you have some high quality backlinks assisting your positions (whether you're aware of them or not).

If your content is good, it's very likely someone linked to your website. That's why your original suggestion to "just focus on your website and your visitors " is so important. Because high quality content builds backlinks! So if you put all your effort into building a high quality website with excellent content, tools, articles, etc. -- you could obtain high rankings without any backlink work at all.

But in competitive niches, this is very unlikely. There's lots of people with high quality websites, content, tools, articles, etc. But what sets apart the top ranking websites is high quality backlinks. For the most part, this doesn't just happen naturally. Lots of time, effort and skill goes into obtaining these high quality links...

 

@health2011 I've about 40k pages

 

Bro every one is stressing over link building because it is the most important factor in gaining top search engine rankings, so if one wants to be at the top of search engines one must stress over link building

 

Rightly said by the poster. You can target a low competitive keyword and can easily rank by just having the keyword in your domain name and little content. However it is very difficult for you to rank good at Google without the quality backlinks for medium or high competitive keywords. And the truth is that most of the high paying keywords are highly/medium competitive.

 

Again, you can create a mini sniper website for a low competitive keywords and you will get easily get ranked however if your website is mean for Google AdSense high-paying keywords or click bank affiliate marketing products then you will have to have the backlinks

 

why no examples of your sites, the reason most people don't like to mention their domains is soo that people dont steal their links but you in your case that shouldn't be an issue