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This is Grumpy SEO Guy, Episode 144 can youn Rank Without Backlinks? You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the grumpy SEO guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because a lot of people say they can rank without backlinks. In this episode, we're going to look at four cases and see if this is correct. Before I do that, hello@grumpy SEO guy.com is my email address. You can email me and ask me questions. If you have a complicated question, you'd like to set up a Zoom advisory call, you can email me and we can get that planned. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so@patreon.com grumpioseoguy if you'd like to ask questions to me or other listeners, you can do so@Reddit.com r grump seoguy and if you like the podcast, please subscribe. Let's get started. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical. And based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. Many people in the SEO world say they can rank without backlinks. I have seen four cases where people make this claim. In this episode, I'm going to tell you what those cases are, and then we're going to talk about if they're correct or not. So here's case number one. People say they can rank without backlinks when they write articles for websites that already have a lot of authority. Okay? So if you already have a lot of authority, you might not need backlinks to your Specific article because your article is already pulling some of the authority from the domain, so that doesn't count. Number two, people say they can rank backlinks because they write the blog and someone else builds the backlinks. Come on. That doesn't count. Number three, people say they can rank without backlinks because they have very small competition. Look, if you have nine or fewer competitors, you might be able to rank without backlinks because you only have nine or fewer competitors. So you would be 10, and then there would be the 10 results on the first page, and technically that would be ranking, but that doesn't count because you only have nine competitors. Like, as soon as someone else comes along and does anything, they're gonna outrank you, so that doesn't count. And number four, people say they can rank without backlinks because they're charlatans. There's a lot of people out there that are trying to get you to purchase their content that they will write for you, and they tell you it's so well written that you don't need backlinks to rank. Wrong. That's not. No, it just. Search engines cannot tell how good content is, and there's so many problems with thinking that they do that. We actually have other episodes that explain why that's wrong. Just for now, they can't tell how good content is. In fact, what they can do is use authority as a proxy for how good content is, okay? But they cannot read content and tell if it's good or not. Furthermore, even if they could, this is okay. This is, like, the main thing that people miss when they think that content. Quality of content can make you rank higher. There's something like preferences and bias and opinion. And so if content cannot be good or bad because somebody might like it and somebody else might not like it, okay? Just like any. Any. Any music or art or movies, there is no such thing as a good movie or a bad movie because there is bias and preferences and opinions. So there's no such thing as good content. So a search engine couldn't even. A search engine couldn't even possibly tell if it's good content or not. It can tell popular content. It can estimate how good content might be based on how much authority it has, but it can't tell how good the content is by reading it. So. So anyway, that's why we have something called authority. Authority. Actually, we're gonna talk about authority very, very soon. Let's talk about the four things that you need to rank, okay? Because this is all, like, relevant here. Okay, so there's four things that you need to rank. And just to be specific here, okay, just to clarify, this is not for local SEO. Local SEO has a separate set of requirements. Okay, they have a separate set of requirements. This is for regular SEO. So there's four things that you need to rank. One, don't get a penalty. A penalty is when you do something you're not supposed to do and the search engines penalize you by squeezing you out of the results and basically you're not going to rank. We have another episode that talks about penalties. All right, I'll put a link in the description, but I'm not going to get into it now. But your top priority is not getting a penalty. Okay, Number two, you need content, but it's not about the quality of the content. Content simply has to do two things on your website. One, it has to be relevant, meaning it has to talk about your keywords. Whatever the topic of your website is, that's what your articles have to be about. That's what your content has to be about. Or you're just going to confuse the search engines. We'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute. Number two, it can't have a content based penalty, which. Which we're not going to talk about now. Number three, you need relevancy. By writing content about your topic, you have relevancy. That's all you have to do. There's actually another way to get relevancy, but it's more complicated and we're not going to talk about it now. And number four, you need authority. Authority is a measure of trustworthiness or strength of a website. Okay? Authority tells the search engines how good is this website and the way it does that is. Well, hold on for a second. Authority comes from backlinks. Okay? Backlinks is how you get authority. Okay? And a backlink is when another website links to you. Okay? There's nothing you can do to your own website to build authority. You can only get authority when other websites link to you. Okay? So that's why I've said in the past that it's kind of like being popular, but not really. But if you think about it like, if more websites link to you, there's probably a reason for that. It's probably because you have a good, helpful website. So that's kind of how search engines can tell how good content is. Okay? But they're not really telling how good content is. They're just basically telling how much other people look like they like it. Okay. And how do they know that? Because those people are linking to you. So that's kind of what authority does. But you. You need authority to rank. SEO is a competition, okay? In order to rank, you need more authority than your competition. Okay? You. I'm gonna say that one more time. You need more authority than your competition, okay? So there's not a. There's not some amount of authority that you need to rank. The amount of authority you need to rank has to do with your competition. You need more than your competition. So this is a very short overview of this, so we're not going to get into this anymore. But at any rate, because authority is needed to rank, and because authority is shared with backlinks, you need backlinks to rank. You cannot rank without backlinks because you cannot rank without authority. So I don't know. I feel like. I just. I'm not sure how else to say this. You need authority, and authority is provided with backlinks, by backlinks. So can you rank without backlinks? No. Unless you're talking about a specific article on a. On an authoritative domain that you did not build backlinks to specifically because it's taking authority from the domain itself. But that doesn't count. So that doesn't count. Or I guess if you have really small competition and like. But that also doesn't count. So, anyways, I hope this answers your question. I hope this was helpful. Let me know what questions you have and I will talk to you later. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe, and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder. And it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks, and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast, because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com Grumpy SEO Guy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday for another episode.