Matt Cutts recently did a video (wearing a Panda T-shirt!) where he revealed that Google had a version of their algo that excluded backlinks but they haven't yet released it because it made the results look worse. He said "at least for now", backlink relevance was still important to Google.
The "at least for now" made me think that Google is working very hard to see if they can ditch backlinks and may well achieve it in the future.
So I thought it would be fun to see if I could rank a website without any backlinks. I'm not going to bother with social either - I'm just going to rely on content, onsite SEO and site architecture/internal linking and see how I do.
I was intrigued by his use of the phrase "backlink relevance" rather than "backlinks". It leads me to think that the real reason Google needs backlinks is because the algo struggles to work out what a page is about by the content only. So in my experiment, I'm going to make a list of words that I want each page to rank for, and then use those words in the internal linking in order to tell G what the page is about.
For example if a page is about Red Widgets and I want to rank for " red widgets", "best red widgets", "widgets that are red", "where to buy red widgets", "red widget reviews", etc, I am going to try to use each of those phrases once in anchor text when I make internal links to the target page.
I'm also going to try to target a mix of high and low competition keywords in this experiment.
I've bought a domain with a very broad generic name (which is unique and brand like) so that i can write about lots of products in this niche. My gut feeling is that with no backlinks and no social I am going to need a lot of content and that's easier to produce in a broad niche.
I will do an update when I have results to report.
The "at least for now" made me think that Google is working very hard to see if they can ditch backlinks and may well achieve it in the future.
So I thought it would be fun to see if I could rank a website without any backlinks. I'm not going to bother with social either - I'm just going to rely on content, onsite SEO and site architecture/internal linking and see how I do.
I was intrigued by his use of the phrase "backlink relevance" rather than "backlinks". It leads me to think that the real reason Google needs backlinks is because the algo struggles to work out what a page is about by the content only. So in my experiment, I'm going to make a list of words that I want each page to rank for, and then use those words in the internal linking in order to tell G what the page is about.
For example if a page is about Red Widgets and I want to rank for " red widgets", "best red widgets", "widgets that are red", "where to buy red widgets", "red widget reviews", etc, I am going to try to use each of those phrases once in anchor text when I make internal links to the target page.
I'm also going to try to target a mix of high and low competition keywords in this experiment.
I've bought a domain with a very broad generic name (which is unique and brand like) so that i can write about lots of products in this niche. My gut feeling is that with no backlinks and no social I am going to need a lot of content and that's easier to produce in a broad niche.
I will do an update when I have results to report.