Google Offers Advice on Ranking Better

In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that sites need to be promoted in order to rank. This goes beyond Google’s common advice about building awesome content.

Can You Rank Without Building Links?

A publisher observed that after two years of work their website has started to rank without haveing to build a single link. The question is basically about link building and if building links is necessary, given his experience in ranking without doing any link building.

This is the question:

“A few of my new websites in competitive niches have started to rank without building even a single link, just with pure content.

It took a while though, more than two years…”

Mueller stops here to observe that those sites probably can’t be regarded as new websites.

The question continues:

“Could I have saved precious time by building links from high end websites to reduce this time period?

Or it wouldn’t have mattered at all, it would have taken the same amount of time regardless?”

The publisher doesn’t offer any details about their promotional efforts, other than they haven’t tried to build links.

Something that is commonly ignored by those who are building links is that attracting links is more than just asking for links or paying someone to drop links in articles.

The best kinds of links, those given voluntarily, often happen with non-link focused promotional activities.

This is John Mueller’s response:

“We use a ton of different factors when it comes to crawling, indexing and ranking.

So it’s really hard to say like, if I did this how would my site rank compared to when I do this. …those kinds of comparisons are kind of futile in general.

In practice though, when you’re building a website and you want to get it out there and you want to have people kind of go to the website and recognize what wonderful work that you’ve put in there, then promoting that appropriately definitely makes sense.

And that’s something you don’t have to do that by dropping links in different places.”

Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-explains-how-to-rank/347896/