You’re Doomed Without Links [Link Building Case Study]

David Farkas 23 comments

SEO is always changing.

If you worked in SEO ten years ago, went away and came back today, there’s little you would recognize.

Keyword stuffing – which is exactly as it sounds – could work wonders for you back in the day. Today? It could earn you a penalty.

Ten years ago, SEOs used to submit spun, useless content to a flurry of article directories.

The idea was that Google would read these posts just like any other, and you could reap great rewards for little effort.

On this front, and many other fronts, Google has gotten a lot smarter over the course of the last decade or so.

As such, SEO has changed with Google.

The ever-changing nature of SEO can be one of its great appeals and one of its great frustrations – all at once.

But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed since Google was born in 1998, let alone over the course of the last decade – the fundamental value of high-quality, relevant links.

Without a series of such links pointing back to your website, your website has little chance of ranking highly in Google.

It’s as simple as that.

The correlation between links and rankings is something that has been proven time and time again.

The positive impact of links is something I’ve personally witnessed hundreds of times over the past ten years thanks to all of our successful link building campaigns.

But, nevertheless, I decided to conduct my own little case study to nail down the exact impact and how long it would take to feel the link tremors.

Today, I would like to share with you the results of that experiment.

The Background

Around 18 months ago I launched a brand new website primarily for the purpose of such SEO experimentation.

Without giving away the farm, the site resides in the health/medical space.

Over the course of the first six months of the site, we developed 26 pieces of high-quality content but didn’t do anything to promote or build links to it.

During the next six months, we waited to see if any traffic would come in.

So during the first year, no link building was done.

As a result of the fact that no links were coming in, there was barely any traffic coming in, as you’ll soon see in the graphs below.

Here’s footage of me waiting for traffic for 12 months:

Finally, after 12 months of nearly zero traffic and thousands of bowls of Trix, I decided it’s time to start building links.

Timeline

  • First six months were focused on content.
  • Second six months we waited and observed traffic/rankings.
  • Final six months we started building links.

The Process

The link building process started roughly six months ago.

When starting any link building campaign, one of the first questions you need to ask is, “Why would people want to link to me?”

Another way you can phrase that question is, “What does my site have that people would want to link to?”

I asked myself these questions and went through the process of identifying the potential value that came with each piece of content on the site.

Although there was plenty of great content to work with I didn’t believe any of the content had a big enough pool of potential linkers.

We could’ve probably winged a few links here and a few links there but I wanted to build out a piece of content that could potentially attract 100+ links.

Because linkable assets are incredibly advantageous to any link building effort, we decided to produce a comprehensive educational resource, which is our specialty.

Suffice it to say, the educational resource covered just about everything you’d need to know about the chosen topic in a clear and concise manner.

Creating a truly ‘linkable’ resource isn’t easy or cheap but is an investment that will earn dividends in the short and long term.

Not only will you save yourself loads of time by sending emails with a high conversion rate, but you’ll also be able to potentially acquire links from highly trusted, niche-relevant pages that reside on the likes of ORGs, EDUs, and even GOVs.

After our educational resource was ready to go, we did what link builders do best.

We searched the vast depths of the internet to find authoritative, relevant pages that would potentially link to our linkable asset.

And then…

Lots of outreach.

During this time span, we sent approximately one thousand emails.

As of today, I can proudly report that we built 103 links.

And I’m not talking just any 103 links. 

Have a look:

Link Breakdown

  • 96 links were to the educational resource
  • Average DR of all the links: 38
  • 27 links had a DR 50 +
  • 5 .GOV’s
  • 3 .EDU’s
  • 34 links from non-profits

Aside from these links, I’m especially proud of the fact that many of the .COM links we built were on sites that don’t normally link out.

You see, there are many ‘authoritative websites’ which, quite literally, link out to hundreds of thousands of random websites.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with such a link but, in my opinion, you can’t compare the SEO value of a link on Entrepreneur.com to the SEO value of a link on GE.com.

Some of the best links we built were both authoritative AND unique, meaning that the competitors, and very few others, have links from those sites.

One of the links, in particular, had a higher DR and fewer outbound links than GE.com.

Having such unique links in your backlink profile can make a huge difference.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t hunt down authoritative links that your competitors also have.

But when you can find a way to build a link on a site that doesn’t link out to just anyone AND has tremendous authority, those are real golden opportunities.

The Results

So now the moment you’ve been waiting for, the moment where I ask myself, “Was it worth it?”

Did building all of those links do anything to help my site’s rankings (and thereby increasing my organic traffic), or did I simply increase my risk for carpal tunnel syndrome by sending all of those emails for nothing?

I’ll let this graph from the Search Console answer the question for you:

Google Analytics:

 

And here’s how things look on ahrefs:

Starting in the last days of 2018 and ending in April of this year, the site saw nearly a 2000% increase of organic traffic!

And here’s the link graph which, as you can see, closely correlates with the traffic:

As of this morning, the website is ranking for 9,631 keywords with 2,245 keywords ranking on page one and 1,199 keywords ranking in the top five results!

Before we started building links, we had zero keywords ranking on the first page.

The Conclusion

Now you may be asking yourself, what does it all mean?

It means that links still matter.

Links have always mattered, but they still matter as much as they ever did.

To be even more specific, link building matters.

The content I had on the site was the same content that was there before I actually started the link building campaign.

No one was linking to that content, however.

This means that you have to do the legwork.

The concept of link earning is fine in principle, and sometimes it works. But usually, it doesn’t.

Even if your on-site content is spectacular, you need to build the roads which will lead people to that content, and in the webosphere, those roads are paved with links.

So if you operate a website in dire need of higher visibility, link building is an essential process for you.

It’s time-consuming, it’s hard work, and the rejection can be draining.

For every one of the 103 links I got, I received many more rejections.

But without outreach and link building, you are never going to reach the heights you aspire to.

Comments

  • Dmitrii Kustov

    Nice article!

    Would you be open to sharing screenshots from Google analytics for this property? Cause Ahrefs data is very skewed, with lots of junk. I wonder how real traffic got affected.

  • Gyi Tsakalakis

    Meh, links! David, I love this stuff. Keep it coming. Without too much secret sauce reveal, can you share any more specifics / details on email outreach?

    • David Farkas

      Hey Gyi,

      There on a number of articles on this blog in which I got into detail outlining our approach to outreach. Make yourself comfortable!

  • Jason

    Great read, David. I think the real answer is that it depends, particularly on the competitiveness of the terms you’re ranking for. I created a website about 2 months ago that’s ranking on the first page for highly competitive keywords with ZERO back links against pages that have huge back link profiles. The content is relevant to the user’s queries and thorough, but the total number of indexed pages is quite thin as I haven’t had time to focus on adding more. I’d also add that there is zero social media presence, local citations, etc. I think UX/UI design and being creative with the content and title/description plays a huge factor.

    • David Farkas

      Sounds pretty interesting and I’d love to hear more, Jason. Most new sites are in the Google sandbox for a few months so sounds like you’ve got magical powers. Lucky you and much success with this project!

  • Andrew Optimisey

    This was a good read.

    Q. The links you built – were they all (or 90%+) to ONE place/page on your site? E.g. just to the educational resource?

    And follow up:

    Q. How many of the rankings and keywords you have now are for that single resource/page? E.g. what’s the ‘halo effect’ on other pages on the site, with zero links?

    • David Farkas

      Yup, Andrew 96 out of the 103 links were going to the one educational resource.

      Great question and probably something I should’ve clarified in the article. But ALL of the traffic is going to the other pages on the site and the educational resource has zero traffic. It’s not even optimized for any specific keyword!

      • Angga

        This is a wonderful case study David!

        I’ve a question, On the educational page, you put internal links to other pages using exact match anchor text?

  • John Marquez

    Great article David. Thank you for sharing. Quick question, what’s your average conversion rate for outreach? Though a 10% link conversion is high IMO. Just curious, thanks 🙂

    • David Farkas

      Appreciate that, John and it can range anywhere from 4% – 12%. We are pretty picky with who reach out to and this was definitely a solid run.

      • John

        That’s awesome David. What would you say is a solid timeline for converting a website into a link?

        From warming up the blog owner to introducing your content?

  • Jason

    David, do you do link building for your own content, or just for clients? Do you feel as an SEO provider that it’s a good use of time to invest in building links for your website?

  • Venkat

    Was your site optimized for other ranking factors before the link building activity? Meta tags, speed, internal linking etc..

    Also how competitive was your niche (according to any search query) before link building?

  • Boni

    Thanks, David for the experiment. Absolutely enjoyed reading this post.

    I absolutely agree with you that without Links you are Doomed. But I’d also add a note at the bottom of the article that in some cases you can still rank with little to no backlinks.

    Cheers,

  • Kevin

    Thanks for sharing this idea.
    When you build a link, did you focus on inner pages or you also build links for homepage?

  • Kunjal

    I have just got 1 question, how crucial is it to build .gov and .edu links in terms of building backlink profile? Is it something mandatory for websites in any niches? May sound like a dumb question but please resolve my query 🤔

  • Axel M.

    Great read on your seeding approach, thank you for the insights. I’m surprised how fast the rankings started to increase.

  • Kyle Douglas

    Hey David,

    Great write up. Really love this kind of article that shows direct relationship between link building and traffic.

    Was there a positive ROI on your link building work?

  • John

    It is proven a fact! Which comes first, chicken or the egg? Put up all the amazing content you want, the fact is, unless you are a well known ie: celeb, EDU, GOVt then the chances you getting that first backlink will be virtually impossible.

    If you have great content, and no one knows about you, then how and why would someone link to a brand new website when google itself says not too?!

    I have recently started a new website also, I have at least 4-5,000 word articles, well, they have no backlinks, thus I will never rank for anything; Even if I wanted to rank for a handful of keywords, I would need more then a few backlinks.

    It is unrealistic for google to say publish your high-quality content, then sit stagnant until your death, because no one will come and as your waiting to get noticed, the smart people are obtaining backlinks moving up into a higher tier while you are gathering google dust particles waiting for something awesome to happen.

    and to be honest, if you had gone after avg backlinks instead of powerful EDU backlinks, then you probably would still be writing your case study, and that is because those 100+ EDU links are far better than some of the best links you can get.

    It does not matter what you believe about link building, if you do not make an effort on getting decent backlinks, then you are doomed from the start. It is very rare that any site will take off from hero-zero without obtaining authority backlinks or having some form of previous recognition.

    and for god sakes, be smart, dont start a blog or site about nothing, random topics, news, or some crap like that; non-niche sites may need a crazy amount of backlinks. Your costs will be higher, and you still may not get off the ground.

    Unless you are an exception to the rule, do not expect your traffic to climb until your 5th or 6th month, by month 9, if you are still producing quality content and backlinks, then by this time you should see a good bit of traffic growth…

    If you stop posting content, backlinks, or both, then your traffic will take a nosedive. There is a correlation between fresh content, new backlinks, etc, so if you go down the SEO road, then understand, it is for life! Once you become inactive, so will your traffic or a good portion of it.

    • Bhagwant Singh

      Hi John,
      Every word of yours is true. I can tell from my experience that creating hundreds of article is all useless, if you are not thinking about the link-building.

      The moment you stop posting or link-building. Your site traffic will start to nosedive.

  • Tim

    Probably the best advice and plan of action I’ve ever gotten. Link building just became the foundational priority of my site. i.e. Why write it if it’s not good enough to get links and isn’t anything people would want linked to their site? The budget just went up and it may be the highest ROI for this coming year.

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