Is anyone successfully building backlinks naturally

[arttse]

By natural I'm not implying doing article directory marketing, forum/blog commenting, press releases, guest blogging etc.

If your main focus is on writing original high quality content on your site and receiving natural backlinks (without requesting them) I am interested in how you're ranking.

[john smith1]

according to me natural link building is prefered than automati submission

[mandark]

I have yet to encounter an IMer who has not built a single backlink for themselves - I am interested in this too. I wonder in which niches that would actually work well, and in a reasonable amount of time.

[jennasherly]

Yes, natural backlinking is better than automated one.

[cka233]

People may link to you naturally if your content is highly insightful or very controversial.

But to survive as an online marketer you will have to build links on your own as some point to get decent traffic to your site

[bcmwp]

The problem is that it's a catch-22. You can't get natural links without artificial links, because no one will find your page.

However, I have built a few blogs that got to PR 2-4 without a single artificial backlink, at least in the sense that I was trying to build link juice.

That's not to say that I didn't link them. Rather, I submitted them to a few directories and used them as forum signatures.

It's just that I didn't understand anything about Page Rank or SEO at the time, and I just thought of it as promotion, trying to get visitors by having them visit the directory or click on my signature.

[garben2011]

Originally Posted by bcmwp

The problem is that it's a catch-22. You can't get natural links without artificial links, because no one will find your page.

However, I have built a few blogs that got to PR 2-4 without a single artificial backlink, at least in the sense that I was trying to build link juice.

That's not to say that I didn't link them. Rather, I submitted them to a few directories and used them as forum signatures.

It's just that I didn't understand anything about Page Rank or SEO at the time, and I just thought of it as promotion, trying to get visitors by having them visit the directory or click on my signature.

Yeah. Actually, I was kind of confused what this whole backlinking thing was even about a few years ago. My sites I just focused on getting very good content and never built any backlinks to them. Yet they ranked fairly well.

So, I never even knew a person needed to manually go after backlinks.

My first real content site I built in 2004 and that has about 2,000 backlinks to it now with many of the links being from Middle Schools, High Schools, Colleges & Universities. They use it for reference material for their classes.

Sometimes a teacher or professor will write to me and ask if they can use a certain article or quiz for their class.

So, yeah natural linkbuilding certainly works. And it used to be I just figured that is how it was done. I never realized people were actually trying to backlink to get rankings. I did get a couple of links for related sites just because they had good content and so we exchanged links. And I participated in a forum because it was interesting to me and I thought it would reach people who would like my site.

I still don't like the whole backlinking for search engines thing. It just seems a little silly to me to put so much focus on something like that when in the end only 10 people are going to land on that first page anyway. So, my first focus for traffic is just to spread the word about my site. To link for people not for the sake of a backlink.

I get kind of Gung Ho about things so for a while after reading about backlink building and how everyone seems so obsessed with it i went hog wild and build a dozen links one day, maybe a thousand the next, and so on trying out services. But never again. It just seems to me like filling up the Internet with a bunch of garbage.

Link for people and I think you may find you get more natural links to happen too.

[dburk]

Hi arttse,

I have launched a number of successful websites that have had only a few backlinks created initially (directory listings) and then promoted via PPC advertising. They now rank highly for many keywords and have earned thousands of natural backlinks.

The problem is how do people discover your website in the first place to see that it is link worthy? You need only a few backlinks to get it indexed and then you may see a little traffic from low competition keywords. That would be a very slow way to get natural backlinks. Any type of advertising or promotional effort will bring in more traffic, and from that traffic you have the opportunity to earn natural backlinks. Naturally, the more advertising and promotion you do to get traffic to your website, the more natural backlinks you are likely to earn.