{"id":109974,"date":"2015-07-09T12:03:23","date_gmt":"2015-07-09T04:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=9974"},"modified":"2021-05-11T05:55:50","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T05:55:50","slug":"rank-google-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/rank-google-links\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Rank with Less Links?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Possible<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the question that my friend and I have been discussing since last year, which I believe is also the question of many.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s true that marketers don\u2019t need to rely on link building alone to rank on Google, external links is still a big ranking factor,\u00a0even in cases where webpages rank without links pointing at them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean external links aren\u2019t valuable anymore?\u201d, some of you might say.<\/p>\n

Well, no, that\u2019s not exactly what I meant.<\/p>\n

I know it\u2019s confusing.<\/p>\n

Allow me to explain.<\/p>\n

External link as a ranking factor<\/h3>\n

In a ranking correlation study conducted by Moz<\/a>, which is further explained by Cyrus Shepard in his post, Can you Rank in Google Without Links<\/a><\/em>, the top 50 Google search results for 15, 000 keywords were examined.<\/p>\n

They found that all websites ranking for competitive search phrases have at least a single external link pointing at them, in fact none of the no-external-links websites ranked. However, there are also instances where individual pages ranked even without external links pointing at them.<\/p>\n

To prove this study, I conducted my own research and analysis. For this, I used Canva\u2019s Design School blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since Canva is a quality site, and recently published a blog post which I assumed doesn\u2019t have an external link yet, I was convinced that it\u2019s the perfect website to use.<\/p>\n

Using Ahrefs Site Explorer<\/a>, I checked the backlink profile of Canva\u2019s blog, \u201c50 Most Beautiful Vintage Magazine Covers Ever Designed<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Canva<\/a><\/p>\n

As expected, since they just published it, it has no external links yet. But when I searched for \u201cvintage magazine covers\u201d and \u201cvintage magazine cover ideas\u201d keywords, surprisingly, this blog post is ranking.<\/p>\n

\"Canva<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s not because external link is out of the picture, in fact, it\u2019s still one of the biggest ranking factors.<\/p>\n

Like I\u2019ve mentioned before, Canva is a quality website, when I studied the main site\u2019s backlink profile, I got a \u2026<\/p>\n

\"Canva<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, a whopping 135, 000 backlinks and 14, 000 referring domains.<\/p>\n

The Design School page alone has:<\/p>\n

\"Design<\/a><\/p>\n

This means that as long as your website (your main site – let’s say your homepage) has external links, individual pages (even without external links) from your site can still rank. This is also proven and very visible on online news sites like CNN, Yahoo News and The New York Times \u2013 many times that whenever they publish a new page, which don\u2019t have external links yet, they are still ranking well. And it\u2019s because these sites are quality and have tons of backlinks.<\/p>\n

How to rank with less links?<\/h3>\n

While it\u2019s going to be hard to rank sites without links, there are ways to rank without too much link building efforts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1. Prioritize quality<\/a>.<\/strong> Rather than spending time looking for tons of websites where you can get backlinks, why not focus on the quality ones instead?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s quite challenging. But building relationships with a few quality websites is better than thousands of irrelevant websites, and in the long-run, you\u2019ll see that it actually saves time.<\/p>\n

2. Target more obscure phrases.<\/strong> It\u2019s hard to rank for competitive keywords, especially when you don\u2019t have much\u00a0quality backlinks, but ranking for long-tail and lower competition keywords is a lot more realistic.<\/p>\n

However, since these keywords have lower competition, expect that these have lower number of searches, and in many cases, none.<\/p>\n

3. Focus on improving user-experience.<\/strong> Google gives emphasis on user-experience, and highlights the importance of click-through rate, time on-site and dwell time metrics<\/a>. It\u2019s best to shift majority of your focus on developing great products, services and content.<\/p>\n

The future of external links according to Google<\/h3>\n

Last December 2013, Yandex announced that the search engine will be a \u201clink-free\u201d algorithm, and although this only applies to commercial queries and only works in the Moscow area, marketers couldn\u2019t stop asking, \u201cWill Google apply this, too?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, no.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s part of Matt Cutt\u2019s answer:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a version like that, that is exposed to the public, but we have run experiments like that internally, and the quality looks much worse. It turns out that backlinks, even though there\u2019s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part are still a really big win in terms of quality of search results. So we\u2019ve played around with the idea of turning off backlink relevance and, at least for now, backlink relevance still really helps in terms of making sure that we return the best, most relevant, most topical search results.”<\/em><\/p>\n

-Matt Cutts<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n