In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s trend analyst, John Mueller, offers advice on ranking better on the search engine. It began with a simple question: can you rank on the search engine without link building?
A publisher noted that a few of their websites in competitive niches had started ranking well on the search engine. And they didn’t have to build a single link.
Instead, the site owners focused over two years of effort on pure content. Now, the publisher is wondering if link building could have helped them rank faster.
The question reads:
“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, and it would have taken the same amount of time regardless?”
The publisher didn’t offer details on other promotional content they may have explored aside from link building.
Here’s John Mueller’s response.
How Promoting Content Helps With Link-Building
First, John Mueller pointed out that Google considers various factors when crawling, indexing, and ranking a site.
“So it’s tough to say if I did this how would my site rank compared to when I do this,” Mueller said. “Those kinds of comparisons are kind of futile in general.”
The Google trend analyst admitted that it makes sense that publishers would want other people to read their content. And they may want to drop their links in “different places” to achieve the goal.
However, Mueller suggested that when promoting content, publishers should not resort to low-quality link building strategies.
Find other ways to get people to visit your website, and if your audience likes what they read, they could link to it, he said. This healthy link-building practice can then add up to signal to help Google understand where your website fits in with the rest of the web.
Mueller noted:
“So, from that point of view, I would not just create a website and like put it up and don’t tell anyone about it and hope that Google finds it and starts ranking it in competitive areas.”
In other words, organic link building is the best way to get backlinks to your website. And you can only do this when you create great content and share them with the world.
Watch the Google Webmaster Hangout Here:
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