Note: This article was updated in February, 2013 and I’ve added a screenshot of the traffic from Jan-Feb, 2013. Traffic stats are below. Also see the updated article here.
I couldn’t wait to write this post because the results I’m about to show you probably go against many of your opinions about search engine optimization today.
If you’ve been following me closely, you already know I’m not a fan of aggressive backlink building.
I’ve always found it to be a tedious task that leads to short term results for the most part.
Having said that, I’m not against SEO and focusing on the right kind of backlink building.
For example, growing your brand and building relationships by writing guest posts on high quality, relevant blogs or any kind of natural link building that abides by Google’s guidelines is fine.
I just personally don’t believe in spending loads of time chasing backlinks.
As a result, a lot of people have criticized my stance on this, stating that I never had to focus on it much because some of my sites are mature and have an advantage.
While having an early start played a tremendous role in my success, I am still finding that today, quality content in the right niche still works for SEO.
I can’t write a post like this without mentioning how risky it is to rely completely on search engine optimization — especially today. So as you read through this, please understand that SEO should only be one part of your traffic plan.
My Little Experiment
In July, 2011 I created a new WordPress authority niche website as an experiment to see how far a website could get today by just writing content and doing absolutely no backlink building whatsoever.
To be honest, I didn’t expect the site to do well and I will reveal the traffic results below.
Some of you are not going to like this part, but I made the decision not to reveal the site to anyone (at least not yet) and my name or any other identifying details (Adsense ID, company name, etc.) are not associated with the website or domain records.
Although, I am using my picture because I just don’t like faceless websites. 😉
Why So Anonymous?
First of all, I don’t want any mentions/links on my sites to skew the results. Second, I am getting tired of seeing my content scraped, copied and plastered all over the place.
Of course this is not going to completely prevent that from happening, but it will cut down a lot of it.
Being transparent has its advantages and I have no regrets because it builds credibility and a loyal following. However, there are obvious disadvantages, and for this experiment I have chosen to keep it hush-hush. 😉
Pat Flynn recently wrote about this same issue on his blog where he decided not to reveal one of his newer websites after so many people tried to duplicate one of his experimental websites. I completely understand where he’s coming from. So I decided to take a leaf out of his book and keep this one quiet — especially while I experiment to keep the results from being skewed.
Traffic Reports
Even though I won’t reveal the site, I will at least share some statistics you may find interesting. Here is what the traffic looked like for the past month…
Here’s an update from February, 2013. Traffic is still increasing gradually. I’ve added roughly 20 pages since this post was originally published (6 months ago).
This is not a huge increase by any means, but it’s not bad considering how little time I spend on this site.
For the record, this screenshot was taken from the WordPress.com Stats plugin. That’s what I use to easily access my traffic stats right from the WordPress admin panel.
More Things to Note
– Even though I am not actively/manually building backlinks, the site is earning them naturally through other blogs who link to various articles. So I’m not saying you don’t need backlinks. I’m just saying you don’t have to chase them. Slow, natural and steady is what Google loves.
– The site has about 120 pages and posts combined, and I have no real publishing schedule/pattern. I spend about 2-3 hours on the site per month. Seriously.
– Most of the traffic is from Google, but it also receives quite a few visits from Facebook. Of course, I cannot see the actual referring page on Facebook in my reports (I hate that!), but it’s probably from people sharing the content on their walls. I do not have a Facebook business page for the site.
– I didn’t do much number crunching with keyword research. Most of the search engine traffic is from a variety of longtail phrases instead of competitive keywords.
– The site is not overly optimized. In other words, I don’t go overboard with keyword repetition and I made sure to vary my anchor text (text inside hyperlinks) when linking internally.
– Bing and Yahoo are also drawing more traffic than usual, which I found quite interesting. Perhaps it has to do with the niche and the audience demographic preferring Bing over Google? I have no way of knowing for sure.
– Once again, I’ve taken the tutorial route with my approach to this website. As you know, this has worked so well in the past, and I love teaching. So I continue to use that style as opposed to just posting generic information and re-reporting facts.
– I’ve chosen another niche where I can use my own personal life experience with the subject to educate and inform.
– So far the site has escaped all Panda and Penguin updates.
– I did manually submit to Google and Bing/Yahoo and also created sitemaps for each engine.
– I’m not using AdSense (it’s not a good niche for CPC ads at all) but I am selling sponsor ads and monetizing with affiliate programs.
Backlinks?
As I’ve already mentioned, I have just focused on writing content instead of searching for backlinks — which is what I normally do. But what is most surprising to me is the Google traffic I’ve received compared to the minimal number of backlinks I’ve earned.
Right now, there are only a handful of sites linking in according to Google Webmaster Tools, and a couple of sites that are just scraping my RSS feed and displaying my posts.
Why Does Google Love The Site?
Could the mild success and traffic gains be a result of the penalties other sites have incurred from unnatural linking, etc?
I’m not sure.
I haven’t spent too much time observing what my competitors are doing. The traffic growth has been very gradual but steady, and I didn’t see any major jumps in traffic with any algorithm updates.
My main goal was to see how a website would perform in Google today without doing any manual link building.
Google seems to be less concerned about the quantity of your backlinks and more interested in the quality, diversification and how natural your backlink patterns are.
After all, the Penguin update really decreased the SEO influence of many types of backlinks.
To Sum it Up…
Don’t get me wrong. The moral of they story here is not to just focus on SEO to build a business. I was just trying to make a point that you can still receive good traffic from Google without obsessing over backlinks and just focusing on quality content.
There’s nothing wrong with targeting the engines for traffic. I mean… you have to start somewhere, right? As I mentioned, you just need a plan to diversify beyond SEO if you want longevity.
As I continue to emphasize, my overall business is not SEO dependent thanks to my forum, multiple YouTube channels, residual income, social media (especially Facebook), my email list, offline consulting (occasionally) etc. I’ve diversified my income and traffic sources to give myself a great deal of stability.
I hope you are planning to do the same.
Also, finding the right niche and angle is key too. Yes, the Net is incredibly saturated with websites, but a lot of the content out here is poor quality and created with minimal effort.
I don’t exactly buy the “net-is-too-saturated” claim as a reason for failure. This experiment definitely proves that.
So the door is still wide open for high quality, useful websites. The angle you take is what will set you apart and get you going in the right direction.
Never underestimate the power of establishing your unique position in a well-defined niche!
Check out the update on this site’s traffic here.
Actually this is possible if you have no competition. But, better do some quality back-linking, gaining links from high quality sites and your job is done. G will do a fast indexing of your queries and you will gain higher ranking at serps 😉
Writing articles on keywords that have been researched using LongTailPro tool is really effective. I got more then 80,000 visits using that tool on my niche site and I love using that tool.
Hi, I created a website 1 month ago, and i´ve been doing my homework on social media, and i got like 200 visitors per day, I already have adsense, but im wondering how to improve my pagerank, so im not clear when you are doing natural links or unnatural as google called. I would love to see an article explaining how should I or any Web master build audience, in case is not linking the page, which techniques can you use on social media to not get spamed. thank you, an great website BTW, also nice videos on Youtube.
Regards
Hey, we all know that when it come to building a business online, content is always king over the internet. just think it’s the content that keeps peoples coming back to your site.
Great article. I definitely think its fair to say content is king. I think its also fair to say that you can’t rank highly with 0 backlinks, but perhaps your content is so good and valuable that people share your stuff and naturally link to it themselves. I have followed you for awhile now Lisa and your content is definitely that good.
That great amazing traffic .but how many months your site was build ?
Well said, i think its not much on how many backlinks there are but more on the quality of the site. From there, users will automatically comes anyway. At the same time i think its vital that a site starts building their presence, and the only way this can be done is through SEO
Content is very important. But it is very important to be able to drive traffic to you your site. You can have a great looking site and lots of content and nobody will come to your site. You need to promote it somehow. Via SEO or pay for ads.
Great post on the value of putting great content on your site. However you still need to drive the traffic to get to the content. In order to get on google page 1 you would need backlinks or other ways to drive the traffic to your sit. Trying at present time FB and Twitter.
Surprised to read that, i read everywhere that building backlinks are most important but you are right, content is king, i planning to start a new site soon and definitely will follow you.
wow nice one sis, 100k visitor. don’t mind if I ask was it unique visitors? getting envy of you :p . your hard work pays. thumbs up.
I don’t have many back-links my blog site is receiving promising traffic from Google search.
Nice SEO article. I am struggling to get traffic to my newly build site and I am going to try these techniques for sure.
Thank you
I am thinking same from some couple of days, because google search result does not depend on those website having quality links even if they don’t have quality content. Gaining quality links takes time, which is sometimes more than developers patience 😀 :D.
Awesome info! I gotta try this because I definitely need to increase my blog traffic!
Great Info! I’ve found that, Social Media, Great Keyword-Focused Content / Long Tailed Keywords, & Building a targeted mailing list brings steady traffic & sales. Yes! Diversify! I’m Starting my offline Promo/Marketing very soon.
Thanks,
Sedrick
Thanks for the awesome pointers Lisa, I have been struggling to get traffic for my new website without building tons of backlinks, so scared of being penalized again due to over optimization so looking for alternative yet natural ways to build good traffic. Awesome post thanks again!
Enjoyed reading this and congratulations of your success with this.
I agree if you start early then you will see results later down the line.
That’s been my experience also, especially with YouTube.
I think too many expect instant results & that rarely happens these days.
You, good lady, are my hero in taking this leap and putting “proof in the pudding!”
Quickie question: Have you done any research or testing on using “nofollow” rel tags on most or all links within articles or websites?
I’ve been seeing some noise or suggestions that this is now the way to go. (I’ll look around here and see if you’ve written to that.)
Thanks for the great site Lisa, btw.
-Bruce
I don’t worry about nofollow / dofollow UNLESS I’m linking to one of my other sites that is not related to the site it’s linked from. In other words, I don’t want Google to think I’m trying to inflate my popularity by linking my pages together.
Creating high quality content and building high quality back links are always good but very hard to do especially when you are managing tons of mini sites and nichs. Therefore outsourcing backlink build to some one who expertise in this area is a shortcut. I knew a guy who doing affiliate marking so aggressively that he managed over 100 sites, what he did basically is diversify backlinks to different SEO service providers and the result is quite good. Although some of the sites are penalized by Google but others are still working fine and new sites are building up constantly.
That’s what I’m afraid of with outsourcing things like that. I know it can work but I’d rather do it naturally — even if that means super slow growth.
i agree. Problem with hiring people is that they just spam different programs like SENuke, XRumer, etc. to blast your site to tons of blogs, make fake profile pages, etc. which generally all have a retarded comment or something that is hardly comprehensible. What’s worse is that it often hits sites that have absolutely no relevance to what you are promoting in the first place, and if you were to visit one of the sites, you’d just be like…. ummm… really?
I like the idea of creating general unique content, but I slowed down on it because it was proving a waste of time. I would sit there and write a 2,000 – 5,000 word article really detailing and teaching things, but then some clown would see me ranked #1, then take my article, spin it, then pass it off as their own except they’d optimize it more for search engines knowing what they were looking for and outrank me with my OWN stuff. One thing I learned though is that when I did it back to them on a whole different level they had a LOT to say about it, and even went as far as to say they only did it to me once. Well that once, was enough for me to do it to their entire site to re-take my spot, lol. Those were for niche sites that are seasonal though, but I’ve learned the SEO genre in general is VERY very competitive and people can be extremely spiteful, so though you can’t stop anyone, you have to make it as inconvenient as possible with encrypting the HTML, etc. Make them work for it and have to retype everything, lol.
Establishing high quality backlinks is very important, but posting a large amount of high quality content is also very, very important!
Keep on working, great job!
Nice… im a little jelly 😀
Hi, I just create my new website. Could you tell me how can I make more customers know our website? SEO? keywords? How to do?
Best regards
Sue
What an absorbing ten minutes since I discovered your blog.
Actually I was searching for “how to create backlinks”, but there’s nothing on Google about this. ALL the information is about how to OBTAIN backlinks.
My point is that if you are the average browser, you don’t know how to make a backlink to an exciting site.
I don’t think a bookmark counts?
I asked the question on UK Business Forum last week, who knew how to make a backlink, and had they done one recently?
EVERY answer was from a professional SEO person!
So I think Google is a long way off track giving value to backlinks, which are mostly sourced through payment to SEO firms?
Anyway, here’s a free idea for you – write an article “HOW TO MAKE A BACKLINK TO A SITE YOU LOVE” – it will be unique?
If you’d take a peek at my blog please and give me some suggestions, I’d very much appreciate this.
Best wishes,
Jocelyn Ollett.
Hi Lisa. Very good post and website. I am really impressed to learn that you can get Traffic without back links. I wish to have w weight loss website and have good traffic. Please suggest how you can guide me on this?
There is no match of organic traffic but with the update of Google Penguin and panda update it may fall you at the bottoms,so also try to build relation with people using famous social media and have permanent source of traffic,by the way thanks for awesome post.
u kidding or what ??? :O though i will definitely give a try to your thoughts lets hope this might work for me as well 🙂
The thing is not everyone is talented at writing BUT everyone is at least curious of being able to work at home. So we subsidize with what we have. If your content isn’t really good and you can’t get anyone to subscribe or have continuous traffic then the logical explanation is to take a more “active” approach. By that i mean SEO. When i write posts, I honestly feel like other people are writing the same exact thing but they were given a skill to express what they felt in words and I wasn’t given that same skill. However, I do have one thing that was given to me persistence. Thanks.
Great post.I should definitely try this on my upcoming new blog.
Hi Lisa, good to know that it is possible to get organic traffic without obsessing on backlinks. I should try this some time on a blog I am planning on making. One question, have you used your mailing list to send to people about the content of that site?
Hi Lisa,
There is another factor which I’m not sure about is mentioning your brand name “site title” and “keywords” related to your brand on other sites without linking back to you, as it’s called co-occurrence and the information on the search engines is not enough.
In my beginnings, I was heavily relying on link building, but after several penalty hits I thought like “I need to read more about whats recommended and not”, and I entirely changed my strategy to only focus on providing quality content and it was linked from high authority websites without asking them!
A great example you provided and it works.
Unbelievable indeed but looks true too. I must say that you deserve a big big applause and congratulations that doing a zero SEO work you have reached to such high peaks of traffic….
Absolutely smart
Oah, very impress! I hope my website 200 traffic/day :D. I think your website has good PR, aticles don’t SEO but your traffic increate up!
Interesting take on getting backlinks without any SEO techniques. The truth is sites with relevant content will get better rankings since they provide the information site visitors are looking for, which is what it’s all about anyway. Thanks for sharing, Lisa.
Lol. This is exactly what I have done with my first blog. All I’d did was write good content. Started in a small niche of around 2000 global searches per month and now moving onto broader niches.
No back links. No Facebook or twitter or LinkedIn accounts.
The key is to write awesome and keyword driven content.
Now my site traffic increases more than 50% per month. I don’t really play the seo game and I guess this is why so many fail. They are so caught up on what Google wants and forget what people want.
Most websites are garbage nowadays. Its not hard to get to the top if you give great information.
Awesome Damo!! I love hearing more stories like this.
Fantastic results, Lisa.
The fact that you took the emphasis away from the whole obsession with back link building, as a means of obtaining great traffic stats, is commendable.
You are very inspirational….
PS: I don’t visit here all that much, though, I have gone through your videos on YouTube, often enough….(And they are great vids—offering very practical”real world” advice )
Thanks, Danny!
Wow very valuable post, and congrats on your effort without the need for chasing those backlinks. Similar to what you talked about, I think some of it has to do with the need to provide VALUABLE content to people. So many sites just throw up a sales pitch and hope that people buy into it. Lead with value, and your backlinks will come naturally!
Hmm this puts me on second thoughts about building backlinks. Maybe after all quality content is more important than spammy backlinks, who knows what google truely wants. Thanks Lisa for the info and I look forward to see what kind of website you are creating. Cheers!
Its unbelievable.As like many bloggers i also thought about backlinks and those are very important to any website.But now i change my view about backlinks and learn some good facts about traffic without backlinks. Thanks lisa.
Hello Lisa,
As usual, you have given me another reason to be a loyal follower for life. Although a lot of people go looking for back links on the Internet and even pay others to help them create artificial back links just to get their traffic going. I believe any meaningful online business person would rather build his following naturally and make the results of quality posts, articles and tutorials speak for itself.
Thanks so much for this article, you’re the BOMB!
Your friend and student,
Arewa Lanre “The Grand Master”
I think backlinks work quiet well, but I agree quality is important too.
Quality is important i have also notice .One of my blog have no backlinks with traditional method of SEO But i have good traffic due to content .
Congrts for such a huge traffic
hello
I saw the information mentioned in your website, the information you are provided is good and helpful.
I am new in this field, please give me some useful suggestion “how can i rank my website: OR how can i make backlinks for my website to attract more traffic.
Please help me
Thanks
Rahul Kundliya
Quality content really does turn good results.
Hi dear,
Congratulations! It’s good to see that Google’s principle works as it’s supposed to.
Thanks,
Abigail,
Hi Lisa, thats a great success story. Too many people have focused on aggressive SEO over the last few years, to the point where many people actually think that aggressive link building is all that SEO is about. The bottom line is that great content attracts quality links, and social shares. Therefore it will always outperform low quality aggressively built links.
I build links to my sites, but I do so by contributing great content. For me its about building mutually beneficial relationships with other authors, and participation. Aggression does not really work in SEO, since you cannot be aggressive without lowering the standards bar.
Indeed. The SEO world has changed. Aggression worked in 2010 but it’s a new day now. 🙂
One of my favorite posts on your website. I always comeback to read the parts 1 and 2 when I need motivation as I build my blog.
Thanks.
I hate building backlinks but I have to do. If I stop building backlink and my site will disappear from google.
Your not alone there Love Station. lol i dont like to build backlinks either…
wow it awesome hope my site will get same traffic without backlink,,,,
Hi Lisa, just had to leave a comment here. I’ve been reading through your articles and cannot stop finding extremely relevant and useful information. You touch on points that other how-to’s only vaguely covered and explain it in detail that I haven’t seen before. I really, REALLY appreciate all of the helpful information you’ve provided here. I created a tech. support tutorial site a few months ago and my traffic is slowly building as I continue to focus on writing quality content. It’s nice to see someone else agree that quality is important rather than trying to plaster your URL all over the internet.
Congratulations! It’s good to see that Google’s principle works as it’s supposed to.