I see people coming on to this site and posting BS comments and those quickly get deleted since they add zero value to my site, and I kinda wish the Warrior forum did the same thing, too.
“Post good content and you will rank effortlessly and gets lots of natural backlinks”
Yea, that’s the most prevalent and “sticky” SEO myth out there still and people believe it, pass it off as truth by spreading this BS on the forums (which much to my chagrin actually allow this tripe, this piss-poor, misleading, damaging content to remain on their supposedly great marketing forum).
Do you have time to waste (as a knowledgeable SEO) trying to re-educate the poor fools who are determined that writing good content then maybe even going so far as to use the oh-so-awesome (and ineffective) Only wire or other social bookmarking tools for backlinks its gonna
“rank em up” and people will…
“take notice” and….
“provide natural backlinks” cuz it’s…
“good content” ????
How’s that working for ya?
Are those links DoFollow if any at all were received?
Did any of those backlinks have your desired anchor text in them, if any at all were received?
Exactly who or what is getting tons of natural backlinks for a site just starting out? SHOW ME PROOF, then maybe I can alter this BS SEO advice of theirs (not mine) and tell you that writing good content to get free DoFollow anchor-texted backlinks occurs in the following niches:
- Spot #1 Reserved for magical fairy tale niche that is worth going after, and gets ranked by Nice people who know how to give natural dofollow backlinks with my desired anchor text, too
- Spot #2 Reserved for magical fairy tale niche that is worth going after, and gets ranked by Nice people who know how to give natural dofollow backlinks with my desired anchor text, too
- Spot #3 Reserved for magical fairy tale niche that is worth going after, and gets ranked by Nice people who know how to give natural dofollow backlinks with my desired anchor text, too
- Spot #4 Reserved for magical fairy tale niche that is worth going after, and gets ranked by Nice people who know how to give natural dofollow backlinks with my desired anchor text, too.
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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Couldn’t have agreed with you more! Excellent post.
Thanks for stopping by Michael, and for the feedback
So you mean if I go round the world being nice to everyone they won’t automatically give me links!
I dont think it helps that at some pointmr Cutts actually did a video saying this is the right thing to do, and anything the big G says must be true , right?
Right, sometimes you have to read between the lines.
Search engines rank the best content allegedly but what constitutes, the “best”content? That’s objective, or subjective to human purview and with Trillions of web pages out there and more being made by the nano-second, there’s gotta be a better way to allocate trust and rankings towards something.
Those are called ranking factors, and backlinks is a major part of that, as well as site/rank/search engine trust, site activity (a little), LSI ( a little) etc…
It’s labor day here in the U.S, so I didn’t feel like writing anything earth-shattering, lol but to rant.
Right now the best forum to go to for SEO tips and what-not is Backlinksforum.com, but it’s far form perfect, some case studies are flawed, skewed, and Terry INSISTS on perpetuating this myth/bad advice discussed here
Spot on.
It’s not SEO, but here’s the thing: If you create genius-level brilliant content with mass-appeal and a certain “viral” quality, then yes, content alone can get you traffic because people will share that stuff on social media and maybe even their blogs etc.
Apart from the fact that this is not the same as getting links for SEO purposes, I think most of us need to be realistic enough that we are not capable of creating that kind of content.
Good content doesn’t cut it. Great content doesn’t cut it. Excellent content still doesn’t cut it. It has to be flipping awesome to perpetuate traffic on it’s own.
And even if it is, good marketing doesn’t hurt (examples: Gary Vaynerchuck, the Oatmeal,…).
The upside of this weird myth: The more people believe it, the fewer competitors we have…
True Dat!
If I blog about Twitter, then that gets more Tweets, for example. Some topics are more conducive to social media viral sharing that others, for sure, but still mainly a traffic tool not a ranking tools for reasons mentioned above.
Nice to see you coming back here more often Shane, you got a good site there btw
Thanks, Daniel.
I’ve been a regular visitor for a while. Just lazy with the comments, usually.
Varying anchor text seems logical, would look far more natural if scrutinised and definitely worked for me.
I read something recently about a triangle of requirements for a site – like the fire triangle (oxygen, fuel and heat) I think it was content (on site optimisation) links (off site optimisation) and traffic (the “heat”) were all needed for best results with a lot of emphasis on the fact that many people were forgetting about getting any activity on their site.
It would make sense to compare traffic against the number of incoming links as it should be a pretty easy way to tell apart natural links building from unnatural. If I were writing an algorithm I may think about giving more weight to those links that send more traffic as obviously the whole point of a natural link is because someone “rates” your site. I am sure this could also be gamed though through bots or something.
Right now the best forum to go to for SEO tips and what-not is Backlinksforum.com, but it’s far form perfect, some case studies are flawed, skewed, and Terry INSISTS on perpetuating this myth/bad advice discussed here
What is the BAD Advice? The Here link goes back to this article.
Thanks for any help.
My bad, meant to link to SEO Gurus Confusion, chapter 6,792
Never mind on last post, its changing anchor Text.
It looked like the same article for a sec.
Well good content does help too. I’m subscribed to a blog (non-IM) that has some 2000+ people subscribed (at last count) and no promotion of any kind is done on it. The content is so good (mainly self development and productivity) that it gets passed around in blogs and that’s how I got to know about it.
I’ve remained subscribed for the last 6 months or so now… and no IM guru has lasted that long in my inbox at least.
Good points, thanks for sharing.
Does this site rank for any major keywords?
I tend to agree on the above article. I have had only a couple of article pushed to the top with natural occuring backlinks, and even then I had to push them up there first.
So that means if I didn’t take action first to get them ranked well, then they wouldn’t of got those natural links, because nobody would of known they were there!
Marty Ware
The SEO DAD
I don’t necessarily agree that great content will not bring you traffic over time, but I do agree this probably won’t work in the IM niche.
If you decide that you are going to use SEO in order to get traffic, than writing good content shouldn’t be the base of your operations as it really doesn’t work.
There are link building methods that are more about driving traffic than about truly providing SEO benefits and most people confuse them.
Doesn’t work in IM Niche, SEO Niche, Health/weightloss niche etc….
Who’s gonna give the free natural valuable links? Other webmasters, right?
Just not in any competitive niche, but if you do get some from other webmasters, maybe it’s because they’re noobs who heard or read somewhere that linking out to relevant sites and authority sites makes them more relevant and will increase their rankings, it was probably in the paragraph after :write good content and get tons of free, dofollow=ed like with randomzied, exact, desired, specific anchor text.
A previous commenter was right when he said that it takes a little push from yourself to get stuff noticed in the first place. I’m finding tons of niches nowadays using this approach here and whilst some sites has 1,000s or even 10s of 1,000s of backlinks, hardly any of them have anchor text nor are dofollow. So if if you DO get free natural backlinks from writing good content, it’ll most likely be of that variety, ; ie, useless link fodder that builds numbers not relevancy.
Hi Daniel,
Nice post. I completely agree with the idea that the numbers can be misleading when it comes to checking out your potential competitions backlink totals in the serps; I often have had a chuckle after scanning the serps data with seoquake toolbar only to find that a fraction of the links are relevant. However, in my more paranoid ‘afraid of the Google-police’ moments (many of us have probably had if doing this for any time at all, lol) I have found myself building ‘useless’ or not-so-relevant bookmarking links with BMD to help obfuscate or cloud the number of desirable anchored links I am constantly building. Necessary? Probably not. Harmful? I certainly hope not.
BTW, I have enjoyed browsing through your site here over the past few weeks (guilty of lurking and not commenting). A couple of the people who I really respect in this game have stopped posting publicly and your insights on here have really helped to fill the void, so thanks for that.
Stephen, thanks for the insights and feedback.
That obfuscation is more necessary that you might think since it can help repulse some competitors, but also remember to obfuscate your link sources, too
“but also remember to obfuscate your link sources, too”
Oh for sure – I guess that goes hand in hand with the whole shrouding in mystery idea, since all those bookmarking links tend to help cover the more relevant link sources urls. Also is it just me, or do the weaker bookmarking site links tend to show up more easily in yahoo site explorer? If its just me seeing that then maybe too many bookmarking sites used in the past, lol?
Something like that yea… some people are advised to emulate their competitors inbound link profile to compete better, so if you send them on a wild goose chase it gives you time to ramp things up when u see them closing in on you in the rankings.
Shhhhhh….!!
Traffic generation is a segmented topic. Too often people on WF get the social sites traffic generation techniques cross-wise with the SERPS traffic generation techniques and mayhem ensues. For SERPS, Google does not rely on quality content, it relies on **votes**. And it considers backlinks as votes, and quality backlinks as better votes.
Good points here, not sure how its relevant to the post above, though