Does Content Only Rank With Link Juice?

Question

I just wondered if I could get peoples views on some thoughts I have on google optimisation and ranking.

Would you agree that if a website had 5000 pages and all had unique and valuable information, that only a partial amount of those pages would rank well due to low inbound links to the website?

Would you agree that the only way the 5000 pages in total would rank well in google if there was sufficient inbound links to power the content?

Case Study from my website.

I re written around 100 product descriptions. They started to rank well in google and still do. But at the same time I only have around 5-10 inbound links.

I re-written a further 100 product descriptions, and they haven't started to rank at all. Still got the same amount of inbound links also.

Whats your thoughts?

Answer 1

No, content does not require links to it in order to rank.

As I found out previously, Google can find and index a domain without any links to it. Technically, any indexed page can show up in search results, as long as:

1. The query matches the page.
2. The page has not been excluded for spam or malware.
3. There are no other popular pages also ranking for that query.

In reality, this means that without links you will only rank for obscure queries that no one is really searching for. You do need links to rank well, for popular queries.

Answer 2

While a page without links can get crawled, indexed, and ranked, it will only ever rank for unpopular terms that don't have competition in the search results.

The more link juice that a page has:

• The more likely it is to get crawled in the first place. Googlebot will only crawl tens of pages on a site with no or few links. To get thousands of pages crawled, you need a fair number of links to the site.
• The more likely it is to get indexed. Even if the page has unique content, Google may not see the page as valuable enough without inbound links.
• The higher it will rank. For any term that is competitive, you need link juice to get a good ranking.

Answer 3

It seems that most of your focus is on rewriting product descriptions. I suggest that you create some URLs that are articles/blogs which target keywords that your potential clients may enter into the search bar.

Find sites where your types of products are reviewed and leave a comment about the review with your name hyperlinked to the URL that has an article about a product category.

I am of course just spitballing because I would need to know what the site is and what products you sell to give you advice on how to get traffic. Let me know in a reply and I can give you my thoughts.

Some general ideas:

• Find webmasters who have sites that talk about your niche, ask them to write a guest blog post on your site with a link to them, this gives you more indexable content.
• Email me at larionovdmtiri@learninternetgrow with the domain so I can do a more in-depth analysis on organic traffic opportunities.

After all, it seems that you want more organic traffic, and to do that you need to optimize URLs for the targeted search query, without that you can rewrite the product pages till the end of the universe without seeing substantial organic traffic increases.

Additionally, you want to get more no-followed links as well as do follow because even though they don't contribute to you PageRank score they do affect the level of your organic traffic.

Answer 4

Content is the King now a days(http://www.searchenginejournal.com/snapshot-seo-2015-beyond-infographic/144260/). Inorder to rank the website for a particular keyword many factors are considered.

As already discussed the Google Search Engine has become more intelligent. It uses about 200 ranking factors (http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors) in their algorithm.

But the Google follows some Search Quality Rating (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/11/updating-our-search-quality-rating.html) for the improvement of its results. Which help in providing better results to the users for their query in the SERP.

And also it does not give much importance to the Backlinks but only to the users prospective.

Answer 5

Not Agreed that only Link Juice matters for the SERP while there are a lot of peoples who are facing the same scenario as you explained. As per Google Webmaster Guidelines there are 200 factors involved for the ranking. But nobody knows what's exactly they are? We only play with Links, content, Meta-Tag, Heading tag, UI & UX. I recommend to you that go with Moz Research upon this topic.