If you stop building links, are your sites guaranteed to lose their rank?

[Rush]

I've heard people say that if you stop building links, your site will lose it's ranking in the search engines. Does this only happen because other sites keep building links while you do nothing?

Basically I'd like to know if I build 50 links to a niche site with virtually no competition (competing sites have 1-2 links a piece), should I be set until more competition arises? Or will google eventually drop my ranking because I stopped gaining new links?

[inovica]

Hi,

Really good question!! I had been thinking about this myself as I would be interested to know whether SEO is something that must be done for the life of a website.

I do SEO on one particular site, that does very well for a very competitive keyword, but the site bounces around the top couple of pages of Google and I wondered whether that was because the other sites completing for the word are putting as much effort in as we are, and therefore the competition is ongoing.

So, thanks for the post Rush, and I hope someone can help!

[JONBOY666]

Hi,

There is no 100% guaranteed answer to this but in general - YES.

You need to keep links coming into your site so that SE's know the content is still relevant. It's all about being natural. If Google sees that that a site was getting regular inbound links and then these links stop, They are likely to feel that your content is perhaps not as relevant as it was.

There are exceptions to this. For example, if yor target keywords are very low competition and you have more good quality links than your competitors it is possible to stay on top without a continual linking campaign.

I have some sites that have stayed on top for for their target keywords and I haven't promoted them for months. But I know that without more promotion it is likely they will eventually lose rank.

In general, I put 20% of my Adsense income back into link-building.

Of course other factors come into play such as domain age, link relevance and link quality (and many others) but in short...

Keep promoting your site.

Hope this helps,

John

[bgmacaw]

The more competitive your target keywords, the more you have to do to stay on top of the heap, including getting new links and adding new and relevant content.

But, for less competitive keywords you can rank for them for quite some time without any updates until a serious competitor or a major authority site muscles in. For example, I had a site that was at #1 for a financial services keyword for 2 years with no updates until an article in Forbes and another news site ended up pushing me down to #8. I got links, did some new content on the topic, and now I'm back at #1.

[Smokey_Joe]

I don't think that a discontinuation of link-building would raise flags on its own. Supposing all the web remained static, it wouldn't change anything. But the thing is that the web never remains static. Competition will be quick to follow.

[dburk]

Hi Rush,

You will always be competing with other pages for your ranking, however really great content has the ability to earn organic backlinks. If you content is superior, you could get to the top by adding only a few backlinks and remain there for years while doing absolutely nothing to promote it, hence the expression: Content is king.

[Smokey_Joe]

Originally Posted by dburk

If you content is superior, you could get to the top by adding only a few backlinks and remain there for years while doing absolutely nothing to promote it, hence the expression: Content is king.

Reaching a point when a site does its own promotion by encouraging people to link to it due to the quality of the content offered is very difficult.

I can see another line of logic here as well which is that a content-rich site will outrank one with little content, which is not necessarily so.

[jasonmorgan]

The trick to this, to put your backlinks on auto pilot is get permanent backlinks from a couple of active blogs. By permanent I mean you are on the blogroll / link list, not comment links.

Why you ask?

Because every time they write a new blog post you are gaining a new backlink. They add up over time and before you know it you've got hundreds of backlinks with no additional work on your part.

I'm not saying these are the best links but they do help in the overall mix and it creates a steady stream of additional backlinks to your site running on auto pilot.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by Smokey_Joe

Reaching a point when a site does its own promotion by encouraging people to link to it due to the quality of the content offered is very difficult.

I can see another line of logic here as well which is that a content-rich site will outrank one with little content, which is not necessarily so.

Hi Smokey_Joe,

You are quite right, it can be difficult building a page that deserves to be ranked number 1 for a competitive keyword. If you do manage to pull that off and then build "quality" backlinks (links from highly relevant pages with lots of targeted traffic) then you will likely have a constant steady stream of natural backlinks coming from this direct traffic as well as your top rankings.

Using this strategy you make it even more difficult for your competitors that are relying on backlinking alone to try and keep up with your superior strategy. Even if they manage to pull ahead of you, they can never let up or your self promoting webpage will quickly overtake them again. You competitor will have to constantly spend time and money to stay ahead of your page while you are busy building and promoting yet another quality page.