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Dear warrior friends...,

I've developed several SEO wsos, training courses to build backlinks and Rank on Google's first page, WordPress themes & plugins etc. But I've never done something like this before.

I have several websites ranking on the first page of search engines. We also helped a handful of our clients to reach on the first page too. And, in all those campaigns, we had proper link building going on. But How to rank on first page of Google without any link love? Do you think it is possible to rank on first page of google with ZERO backlinks?? (Yes, NO BACKLINKS building at all)

I'm not sure if its a good idea to go public with such a challenge revealing the actual URL and targeting keyword. I'm taking that challenge anyhow.

I've a blog with some decent traffic and I've just made a post there and targeting keyword 'pinterest wordpress theme'

I'm not going to reveal my strategies until I rank on the first page - but definitely I'm not going to build any backlinks, any at all. You may ask, as a successful backlinks wsos seller I may cheat. LOL! You just have to trust me on this one.

Keyword: Pinterest wordpress theme
Target is in my blog: www.mervikhaums.com

For that keyword, my page is been shown at the 39th page of Google results.

Will keep you all posted here about the updates - if anybody takes the challenge while I'm working on mine, please post your URL and keywords here.

Update 1st October 2012:

If you do a search for the keyword given above, my blog isn't still on the 39th page. Not in the first page yet. But you can find my results with in the first five pages of the Google search results.

Update 9th October 2012:

Good news dear friends, at the moment we are at #12th position :-) If you take a closer look at the blog page, you can easily notice some of the on-site optimization stuff I've done on the page.

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

;)How long do you think it would take to reach your goal mate!!

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

if you succeed tell me your secrets! haha

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

you should ask google....:)

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

@fitnesslover, I'd definitely let you know that 'cool strategy' if I succeed. @DeenaForiya ask Google what? :D

@ProfessionalMarketer, if it takes more than 60 days, I'd personally consider it as a failure. Lets see.

When I started this, My blog was on page 39th of Google results. Right now I'm on page 6 of Google results for the same keyword. You may find it even on page 4 or 5 for your regional Google :-) if you search yourself.

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

I've seen this easily done lately using redirects!

I noticed one day in a very competitive niche that I have always worked in that the #1 site had NO links and was only a month old. Finally, I found that they pulled this off by redirecting the old sites that ranked highly, yet got kicked off page one, to the new site so that the link juice flowed through.

If you can do it without redirects, that'd be amazing!

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Doesn't sound like an ethical thing to do!
..and btw, I don't have an old or highly ranked website for this that could be redirected. Even if I had one, its not something good enough to do and show others that I HAVE DONE IT!! There is no surprise element in it.

I'm not sure about how quick I am able to do this and I'm doing it in a legit way. No HIDDEN tricks and I'd be revealing everything if I reach my goal.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Mervik, I can see that currently you are on the 4th page #6 and what I noticed is SOCIAL SIGNALS that are ranking your page but man you are missing the biggest social signal of the current time that Google prefer for SEO NOW and that's Google+. Go put a G+ button at the TOP of the page on the article along-with the other both buttons and give some G+ hits from fiverr to that button, like you did for Twitter & FB. Go ahead do that and you will be straight on the 1st page in no time. Oh and be sure all of these social signals STICK or you will lose your rankings. Cheers!

Jawad

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

I'm actually ranking on google now with no backlinks page 1 :)

My KW is for 1300 exact local ranked no.8 at the moment no backlinking, no social marketing plan has started yet. Just stuck to the basics and got it there within a a few weeks.

I'm now helping a friend to do the same as well as duplicate the same process for a KW with 9900 exact local results.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Good luck with this. Going to be following this closely!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Hello Jawad,

Yes, right now we are at 4th page. My blog posts are definitely getting some social support from the readers. Fiverring is definitely not something I'd do. The same guy must be sending the same service to many others. If you do it thats gonna bring a -ve result (of getting banned if thats been found out) than a positive result. So my plan is to play very legit in all meaning. Social media is definitely important. But what I'm doing at the moment is something really different. Hope it would work.
Thats some inspiring news. All the best with your efforts.
Thank you. I appreciate the support my friend :-)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Looks very interesting,can't wait to see how you do it now!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Great thread, I am having a similar situation with one of my EMD website, which is on the 9th page. Can't wait to hear about your success and your strategy...

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Hope I would succeed :-) Appreciate the support guys!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Ask Matt Cutts... maybe he'll tell you the full truth and actually be honest about how Google's "secret algorithm" is really just a basic measure of backlinks, and why 90% of results match Bing's because they do the same.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Checking your site it's already show Total Backlinks 349 ...
What is the big happening here:)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

@linkmetro, only that much? I think my blog has more backlinks. Btw, here we are targeting a single page in there. You'd get it, if you search for it :-)

LOL! Are we here to prove him wrong ;)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Good luck to your plans man! Post your results here so we could follow and learn from you.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Appreciate your support and I will definitely keep posting updates of the campaign.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

I hope so, I'm excited to see what we learn from this experiment, and what the results show!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Yeah, I'm excited to see the results too :-)

I request you all to let me know where am I at the moment in your respective google results as the results would definitely vary in your regional google.

And all who are around here would receive all the information about what am doing atm for sure.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Humas,

You are on the 4th page #10 before you were on 7th or 6th as for as I remember. What happened man, are you in Google Dance lol?

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

This is an interesting study. I'm showing one of your articles on the 8th position of page 6

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Our position must be improving right? That's the point of this case study. Isn't it? :-)
Page 8? Could you please tell me the google version you used?

Re: Rank on First Page with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Wow! You that's fast. Share how you did it. Excited to see how!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

How on earth are you gona do this..in this times of penguin and panda? I am really so curios to know. A very good challenge

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

I really appreciate your support guys. Lets see how far I can go with this. :-)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

keep up the hard work,

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

I'm a newbie and I'm still very much in the learning stages on SEO. But on my first professional website for a lawyer I know I got him on Page One in one day with a two word keyword. How did I do it? As soon as I knew this lawyer's interest in opening up a practice in this fairly boutique area several years ago, I registered a domain name for him for that keyword. It aged nicely for several years before his website was even created.

I did no backlinks, just put in the right keywords on his site. It's been an interesting learning experience for me. I'm glad I got into domain names as early as I did. My only wish is that I should have registered a whole lot more!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Aged domains work some times - but definitely not for every niche. As you might have heard, the big G already started dropping the SERPs of exact keyword domain names.
Appreciate the support :-)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Good luck, mate, hope you rank!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Depending on the content you can rank on first page for Google within a few days (4 on my count) depending on the keywords you target.

An article I wrote for someone not long ago, ranked on first page within 4 days and that is after I curiously stalked where my article was being used.

No back links to that site either. And the title is 7 words long. But it ranks for the first 4 words as well. For the entire title, it is ranked 5th and for the 4 words only, it ranks second. Okay...well first. Not bad as it used to be in 6th place, then went to 2nd place a few days ago and now I checked, it's first.

My wording is nothing spectacular, it's on a simple Wordpress site and the angle for the article relates around traveling to 5 different destinations. So a short paragraph on each destination, and what I found fascinating about them.

Sometimes your domain name can influence things as well, depending if you have the main keyword in your domain that your site targets as well.

But this site with my articles has a domain name completely unrelated to the content on the site.

Just some of my observations.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Wow ! There is some serious R & D going here in this thread. Backlinks are a mysterious creature. I am big time confused.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Hi All, I really appreciate your support and insights. Thank you.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Good challenge. I would love to join but I already did this a couple of months ago (accidentally).

I did keyword research, I set a site up, and asked my writer to upload content consistently.

I was too busy with other projects that I forgot about building links for it.

After 3 months, I wanted to build backlinks, but when I checked Google, it was already ranked #1.

I was very surprised with the result.

I guess sometimes on-page SEO and good content can already do the job for you.

Good luck with your challenge MervikHaums.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

@Louie Sioco, really appreciate your insights and support. Thank you.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Dude, I just checked! This site ranks #12 in Google for that keyword, when I checked just now!!! I can't wait to hear how you did it!!!! You're almost there! If you can do this confidently and successfully, in this post-Panda / post-Penguin / post-EMD era, then I think you will definitely be onto something!

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Thanks for sharing that wonderful news my dear friend. :-)

Yeah, we are at #12 Now - Sweets to everybody :-)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Thats true.. You are on page rank 2 mervick

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Wait a minute... I just checked.... This domain has a page rank of #2. The domain was created on 12.08.2010.

So it's not a "brand new domain".


So what exactly are we testing here???

What is the history of this site?

According to Google site search, this site has 176 indexed pages, with content dating back since the site was created.

According to BackLinkWatch this site has 349 backlinks to it.

I guess this not a test of how to get a brand new site to rank without back links?

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Interesting test...but let me give a reality check... anyone who knows anything about SEO knows that social links are huge and because of the popularity of your site and the large following, your target page already has a couple hundred social links.

So you're not really ranking a page with no links. I get that you're not producing any OTHER incoming links but these social links should be near enough to get you on to page 1 for a term that has only 2,400 monthly searches according to google. I'm actually surprised you're not on page 1 already. I think any keyword with "wordpress theme" in it is super competitive and that's why you didn't go immediately to page 1.

Also, if this works out for you, one other major factor will be your domain reputation and authority. Someone who starts a new blog on a new domain would find it impossible to rank for a keyword like this with no off page SEO.

Like hyderkhan said, we're not really testing a brand new domain started from scratch. Hopefully people realize that.

Regardless, congrats on building a site with good following. Looks like you're having good success with it. I think you'll bump up to page 1 soon.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

@hyderkhan, definitely it's not about doing it on a brand new domain name and I've never stated anything like that. Its all about bringing a 'new blog post' to first page without working on link building. I've this blog up for quite some time and it has a good following. So that's not the story.

@WebEminence thank you very much for your insights. Yeah, the phrase wordpress theme in it makes it tough to crack. I hope you'd reach first page soon. Appreciate the support.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

please, how can i get the right strategy to be able to rank on a particular keyword on google.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Hi, we're still not on the first page. I'd share how I did it once we hit our target :-)

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Waoooo Marvik you are now on the first page..So How did you do it?

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Which Google data centre are you using? In mine, it is not on first page yet.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

I jst checked again. On my phone u r on #1 1, why on ma laptop you are on #1 8. . . . . .some other please confirm.

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Infact you are also ranking #1 8, for "pinterest like wordpress theme"

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

@uzojvp, thank you. You might be searching with quotes ("")?

Re: Rank on First Page of Google with NO Backlinks - Challenge??
 

Hi there,

What's your definition of "no backlinks," I have several blogs that are already ranked page 1 for several keywords but i do have backlinks from authority sites, ezine-articles, social medias and several related blogs.

My backlinks are not blackhat though (means i don't mass submit for backlinks, i don't spam).

I would love to participate in this challenge,
Jeremiah