Do any web sites flourish exclusively from organic links? This is to say, has anyone been successful, by making a decent web site, sharing it with their friends, and then people naturally linking to it, without initiated backlinks? Is it possible to naturally gain standing with google this way?
I would think no. I am sure in the past it did. It might happen in a few small niches. And it might work if you have the right friends (ones with popular websites!)
Once you get to a critical mass of links and SE results, a good site will grow through people finding it naturally. Yet, to get to that point I think you usually need a push through link requests or advertising.
Nah, not even. If you leave a website just on it's own, with no effort put into linking and promotion then it will just get lost and die - doesn't matter how long it's left on the internet.
It's possible, but doesn't sound too likely. Unless your friends do the work for you and spread the word about your site. ...now that I think about it, Maddox claims that his site promotion has been strictly word of mouth. I do remember reading that he doesn't spend anything for advertising. Crude example but it proves it's possible.
It does happen a lot around the net but depends on the subject. It is difficult to tell at times because you never know how the link came about.
Completely! But there's little money in it because the content tends to be very general and therefore the cpc is low. I have a site that is only created by organic links and has 400k visitors per month. With all the advertising, I'm lucky to pull in $400/mo and that is spent just to maintain the site. I end up paying out of the pocket to make ends meet. It has taken years to build it too. And the visitors will all disappear in one day if I don't supply heaps of new fresh content on a daily basis. As more newspapers move to the net they're going to see the value of their ads decreased as their buyers realize how little people actually will see their ads. Makes me wonder how they can even make money selling ads in newspapers.
It can be done and it works a treat. You just need a site/content that people would want to link to. Have a look at my natural links experiment: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=86690
This seems definately possible to me because I have a number of websites that have seen such organic link creation although naturally, it takes a very long time to achieve this. But if you aren't desperately searching for so-called "traffic" as seems to be the popular thing these days, then it is possible to have a naturally growing site. As they say, "content is king", and it's no exception to a website. Have good quality content in a way that users will enjoy it and come back for, and have good interactivity. Then you will soon start to possess people wanting to link to your website.
It really depends on the content, in my experience. A finance site that's thick with lots of in-depth text content won't get natural links as much as a light humor site, or a unique myspace linkbait site.