Anyone have a clear example where getting great backlinks increased their rankings significantly?

[footinmymouth]

Of COURE mueller would say there is too much focus on links.

Ill provide some examples tomorrow via dm

[BettyImADreamer]

This is a very interesting question that I too am interested in. I write for my company’s blog and we have low domain authority and very few backlinks, but yet have outranked established competitors on certain keywords through good on-page SEO.

My suspicion is that the importance of backlinks has changed. Before the Hummingbird update, Google used links to get a sense of relevance and authority of a page. Hummingbird puts more of a focus on the utility of a page and how useful it was, moving away from focusing on keywords. It feels like this is happening with links too, to help avoid a situation where people write for links vs. writing to help users (ie, answer questions).

That said, it is likely that the most robust pages will also have many backlinks, but that may be more of a correlation and not necessarily causation.

[jgillman824]

Well you should never do one and not the other, but I’ve had a backlink profile help me rank my own site before

[NHRADeuce]

>If you’ve been around long enough and have been persistent in working on your website, you’re going to accumulate good backlinks over time.

That’s not true at all. There are thousands of websites that have been around for years producing good content without a solid backlink profile. Over the years I’ve worked on several news websites from the local weekly newspaper up to a giant weekly national site. The latter having been around since the mid 90s and is the authority in their space (they are the governing body). Did those sites get backlinks? Sure, but no where near the number or quality of a site that works on it actively. I wouldn’t call their backlink profiles very good and as a result they are often outrank by sites that do try. Inevitably, the majority of the backlinks these sites get are for the home page. So the home page ranks high and generally #1 for related searches, but nothing else ranks or ranks at the top. For the governing body site it’s pretty common for other sites to rank higher for individual stories than the the site that produced the content to begin with.

>I think it’s one factor, but not a very big one

You’re 100% correct about this. There isn’t a single factor that is all powerful or that will have a significant impact on rankings by itself. However, each backlink a site has is a rank factor. Unlike virtually every other rank factor, there is no limit on how many backlinks you can get.

You can only have so many internal links without being spammy. You can only have 1 SSL. You cannot make your site load faster than 0 sec. Other rank factors have built in limits in their effectiveness and they are effectively neutralized if your competitor does the same thing as you.

So individual backlinks are small rank signals, but they add up. Over time, the accumulation of backlinks becomes a stronger signal. Actively acquiring backlinks just makes that process faster. It’s the difference between filling up you pool with a garden hose or filling it with a fire hose.

[zorbisbusinessus]

The age of the domain of your site’s backlinks has an impact on your site’s SEO and the value on which Google places them. Older domains can be more powerful than newer ones, as Google sees them as more trustworthy. Therefore, backlinks from older domains will help your ranking more than newer sites.

[ClickedMarketing]

> I’ve seen web design agencies with a crap backlink profile (in comparison) out rank old giants with a huge backlink profile (quality and quantity) who are doing SEO, purely because they have more content on their page and stuff keywords and have slightly better targeted title tags. (PM, Ill give you an example)

Are you talking about locally ranked agencies or nationally ranked agencies. Local rankings are a lot different than traditional SERPs.

[ClickedMarketing]

Links have been the #1 ranking factor in Google since the day it launched. That hasn’t changed.

The only evidence I have is every single project I’ve worked on in the past 15 years or so.

Also, I have yet to see a page ranking for anything competitive without links.

If links were not a significant ranking factor, why do you think Google has fought so hard against link tactics over the past 20 years? Everything from the Penguin algorithm to targeting private networks to even taking manual actions against major companies like JCPenneys for their link manipulation schemes.

[SEOVicc]

Just run any well ranking site through ahrefs it’s not that hard to spot out.

[emuwannabe]

Yes I have an example. One of my own sites – a side project.

The phrase “RV Living” has over 12,000 monthly searches. My website started out (obviously) with no rankings for this phrase, or anything similar. After 1 month I was in top 30. Just from link building.

Now I’m now ranking consistently top 3-5. after 2 years. I’ve held top 10 positions for about a dozen of my top phrases, all highly competitive, for the past 1.5 years. All from link building.

I publish maybe 1 article per month.

I also have many many clients in the same boat. Sites where no content is added. It’s purely link driven and we consistently get them found for most of their primary phrases on the first page of Google.

[dedazzy]

Link is a ranking factor for sure.
For example I just started a website on 2 April and I wanted to rank for the main keyword which is getting 500k traffic (Ahref)
Just get the content ready (700-1000 words). Placed 10 articles. Did some pretty good link building (Paid) I am on 40s out of nowhere for that keyword in 1 month
So, it worked.

For competitve niches like VPN, hosting, digital marketing, link building is neccessary.
Everybody can get 5k words articles, 99 Page speed, Optimized title & desc. But one thing for sure is different i. e link building. You have to keep an eye on competitors link profiles to match them.

[jchang2080]

I do SEO for an eCommerce site in the skincare industry. Ive had an experience where backlinks helped, but I don’t think it’s necessary. We wanted to target a keyword that was quite competitive with websites like Men’s Health, Esquire, and GQ ranking for the keyword . After we created the blog post, I reached out to two large sites in the niche and got backlinks from them. After these two backlinks, our rankings shot up from #10 to #1 in a month and page views for this keyword went from around 40 a day to 300 a day. Usually, I don’t focus too much on off-site SEO since on-site SEO is enough to get my client ranked in the top 3 for the keywords we want to target. However, in this case, I think that backlinks helped us get the #1 spot. Granted, these were two pretty big authority sites in the niche so that made quite a big difference than hundreds of low DA links. I personally don’t think backlinks are too important unless you’re trying to rank for a pretty competitive keyword. As long as you make sure the site is healthy technical-wise and speed-wise and you know which keywords to target, you should be fine.

[thenutsuperman]

I have an year old website and it has literally zero backlinks built (actively). For me atleast, backlinks are not much important. Maybe it is the nature of my niche, or my competitors are shit at SEO, thirdly my on page SEO is too damn good(which I do not believe in) or lastly every possibility combined.

Talking about John Muller’s statement you just quoted, c’mon why will I tell you my secrets, just to get you outrank me? He is just hiding what actually they follow at Google (which has been for a long time now). No wonder, they have monopoly when it comes to being a search engine

[TheSkepticGuy]

I’ve been creating content for the web since it was possible to do so. I built a user-generated content community that has more than 5 million distinct pages. Today am I CMO for a B2B PaaS company. In all my direct experience with website content between communities, B2C and B2B, I can say one thing with absolute confidence:

**Backlinks Have Been Mostly Irrelevant Since 2018, And Pointless After RankBrain.**

Back in 2012-ish, at an event at Google HQ, Matt Cutts told me directly that Google is slowly phasing out the importance of backlinks. Why? Because it’s gameable. And if there’s one thing we know about the Google Black Box is that anything gameable never lasts long.

[Rlogical_Techsoft]

Backlinks helps to push your keywords in ranking factor. I have shared here my experience that my company want hire flutter developers keywords in top 10 on Google but last month it was on 30 positions. so, I had change meta title, description as well as create quality blog on high quality DA PA sites. We were shared on social media groups. that blog given more traffic on social media as well as that sites. Now, I’m getting my keyword in top 10.

So, there are many factors responsible for improving your ranking, such as meta title, description, content and quality backlinks are required for getting ranking too.

[abhinavthak]

Backlinks gives you more domain authority which in turn provides the ability to try for difficult keywords,