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How much of a successful website’s backlink profile is natural?
There are a lot of successful websites out there with hundreds of thousands or even millions of backlinks. While I’m sure regular outreach has likely been a part of the process for a lot of these websites, I was curious to know, what percentage of these backlinks have been pulled due to the content itself, and how many were built through outreach.
Appreciate any responses.
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13 Replies
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~80% is the average across my portfolio. Thing is, once you hit a “critical mass”, link building becomes less valuable relative to proper brand building.
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Tons of sites build success without building a single link themselves. How much link building do you think Reddit or Facebook did?
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Lots of successful sites have 100% of their links from being gamed, bought, scammed, or otherwise rule breaking methods.
Lots of successful sites haven’t cheated at all and are truly 100% legitimate.
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Sites that people like and want to use get links naturally (because people know it, like it, use it). You just need to get the first couple links to “get on the radar” as bi-nz pointed out. Advertising is probably the best way to launch a new site and getting people to use it (since you’re starting with 0 visitors/day).
A websites back link profile is directly correlated to “is it useful”. That’s what Google means when they say to focus on the user and you hear people saying “content is king”. Useful sites get linked to, because the site provides some sort of value to a certain audience. Crappy sites do not have healthy backlink profiles because you’re fighting an uphill battle, trying to build links to something that people don’t care about, like, or use. So you have to resort to manufacturing them.
The best analogy I’ve heard regarding making money is this: How do you catch a mouse? Do you chase it and try to capture it? No. You put out some cheese and let the mouse come to you. Your website is the cheese. Good cheese attracts links and visitors
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This is going to vary so much depending on age and authority of the company. I’d expect a new business to have to work more at getting them, whereas at enterprise level and with the right content you’ll get the naturally.
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Really depends on the niche, some just don’t get natural links often. If you’re in porn, gambling, pharma, insurance or law, you can’t expect many natural links, unless you class affiliation links as natural. Yet these are some of the most expensive and profitable niches around which require huge amounts of links to rank for the biggest keywords.
Also, put yourself in the shoes of the people that are creating these natural links. Say you were given a subject to write on, what’s the first thing you do? You research it on Google and you’re not going to go through 10 pages for that research, you would probably check the top few results. Having natural links is easy once you have the rankings but not so much if you don’t.
There are of course ways where you can push these natural links through skyskraping. vanity, guest blogging, broken links, unlinked mentions, social & PPC but I feel that people who are saying number like an 80% natural link profile are either talking about already established brands, have an incorrect understanding of natural or just plain lying.
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100% according to google. That’s the story I want to stick with
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(translated from german to english by google translator)
As far as possible, all backlinks should have arisen naturally. – Synthetic – systematically generated backlinks can produce the exact opposite of an improved ranking because such measures are not permitted and therefore against the guidelines of various search engines, especially Google. I strongly advise against such things. I wouldn’t even think of rocking Google search in this way.
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You need to define “success” as different niches will be “spammier” than others. But if you’re working in a competitive niche, with a big market value, my experience is 75-100%.
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Google translator:
Hi, Phil from Berlin..
Backlinks are not an extreme foreground topic for SEO 2020. If you value a good Google ranking but have little or no SEO expertise yourself and do not intend to pull new SEO knowledge from the Internet and press specialist literature into the brain like I do every day … then my first advice would be to do so at least start to read the Google guidelines. And in my opinion, every entrepreneur would do well to become familiar with the 10 Google basic rules. It’s really not fun. This is important and easy to do without having specialist knowledge. Finally, a small representation of my everyday work and the avoidable efficiency backlinks in Here I report real SEO according to the current standard (i.e. real SEO according to the latest regulations, technical) – because I have to deal with such nonsense permanently. A website that has, for example, 500,000 backlinks but the meta data is incorrect or completely missing – such a page cannot rank. Technically impossible. Whereas another website with zero backlinks,
Good page structure in the source code
and where the H1, H2, H3 etc. are not missing, meta data have been stored and at best the serps make sense – I will rank you one page without backlinks. Backlinks are not bad – nice to have … but by no means must have. Where is something like that. At no point does Google need backlinks from website operators to rank. This is a somewhat outdated SEO trick but will lose its effect in the foreseeable future. And I again emphasize wrong linking or illegal link building is SEO Harakiri and is guaranteed not to lead to the goal. Google has such nonsense and reacts violently to something. To inform Google guidelines but to want to rank well on Google … sounds silly only to me or is it the same with others.
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I have a famous, high traffic blog that’s been around for over 10 years.
Never once obtained unnatural links. 100% natural and organic backlink profile.
Someone else mentioned it here: focus on *brand* building, not link building and links will come on their own.
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1%
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Some are bought, some are gained naturally age and authority have a lot to do with it also
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