Can you rank with no backlinks?

Can you rank with no backlinks? This a phrase website owners are likely to find themselves typing in to Google (or equivalent search engine) at some point. Is ranking with no backlinks something that can be achieved though? Let’s find out shall we?

The scenario that usually leads up to this search query is often a result of a website being bought online, but receiving no traffic, or only a minimal amount of traffic and the website not being easily found in website search results.

This prompts the website owner to start researching SEO, and looking into what helps with website ranking. While there are a lot of factors that affect SEO, at some point, some SEO information is found stating that backlinks are a ranking factor.

When someone starts looking into backlinks they often think something like “this backlink business sounds labour intensive, involves other people, and if done wrong it can negatively affect my website’s SEO and ranking”. It’s at this point that most people google “can you rank with no backlinks?”.

A backlink is a link from someone else’s website to your website (or a page on your website). So it’s really a link from one website to another in its most basic term. All HTML links are written in the same format.

A link, in HTML looks like this:

<a href="https://example.com/product" target="_blank" rel="sponsored noopener">
  Check out this amazing product</a>

All HTML links take this format (although in some cases, some aspects can be omitted).

Here’s a breakdown of what’s in the link above.

The target URL is where the link leads to. It’s the page you’ll arrive at if you click the link. In the link example above, the target URL is https://example.com/product:

href="https://example.com/product"

The target attribute tells the browser how to behave when the link is clicked. In the link example above, the target attribute is:

target="_blank"

This tells the browser to open the link in a new browser tab. There are a few different attributes and browser behaviours that can be used, but these aren’t SEO specific, so this attribute isn’t very relevant to the subject of this post.

The rel attribute defines the relationship between the current page (where the link is) and the linked page (where the link leads to). In the link example above, the rel attribute is:

rel="sponsored noopener"

In this case:

• sponsored tells search engines it’s a paid link (which is important for SEO compliance).
• noopener is for security (prevents malicious use of the window.opener object).

The rel attribute is really important for SEO as it can be used to tell search engine’s robots if they should follow the link or not when crawling pages:

The anchor text is the link text, or the text wrapped in the HTML

<a></a>

tags.

In the example above the anchor text is:

Check out this amazing product

This is what the visitor sees as the link text that they’d click on to see the links.

All links are important for SEO. This is because search engine crawlers (or robots) follow links to discover pages. These might be links in your website’s menu being used to discover pages on your website. They might also be links to other websites (backlinks).

The backlink itself shows some kind of relationship between the two websites. At a basic level this could simply be one web page’s content referring to another pages content. At a more complex level, these backlinks can include the attributes mentioned above to tell a search engine more about the relationship between the two websites. For example the rel sponsored attribute could used in a link on a blog post for a product that the blog owner gains commissions from.

Most people consider backlinks to be part of E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness:

• Experience: Has the author actually done or seen what they talk about?
• Expertise: Does the content show knowledge and skill in the subject area?
• Authoritativeness: Is the site (or author) recognised as a go-to source in the field?
• Trustworthiness: Is the content honest, accurate, and safe?

Backlinks support Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness by acting as endorsements. They help E-E-A-T by:

• Signalling authority: If trusted sites link to yours, it shows you’re seen as a reliable source.
• Supporting expertise: Backlinks from niche-relevant or academic sites show subject-matter credibility.
• Boosting trust: Links from reputable organisations or media sites increase confidence in your content.

Google do provide advice covering best practices for backlinking.

Then again google also say that E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor.

This is one of the most misunderstood topics in SEO. I’ll admit I find it a bit hard to explain… here goes.

E-E-A-T is Part of Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.

Google uses human reviewers (Search Quality Raters) to evaluate the quality of search results. These raters use E-E-A-T to score content quality during testing. Their feedback trains and improves the algorithms, but doesn’t directly affect live rankings. So while E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking signal itself, it influences what Google engineers optimize for.

Google’s Algorithms Try to Reward E-E-A-T Qualities.

Google looks for indicators that align with E-E-A-T, like:

• Author reputation
• Structured data (author info, organisation schema)
• Site security (HTTPS)
• Backlink quality (poor quality backlinks or trying to game backlinking can harm your SEO)
• Content originality and factual accuracy

These actual signals are part of ranking systems, so people align E-E-A-T with ranking factors in their heads, and verbalise both as one of the same.

SEO Professionals Simplify the Message.

Telling clients “Google rewards expertise, authority, and trust” is easier than explaining complex algorithmic proxies.

So E-E-A-T becomes shorthand for:

“Build quality content that real people trust and Google will reward it.”

Maybe think of it like this:
E-E-A-T = a concept or goal (like being healthy)

Ranking factors = the measurable signs (like heart rate, blood pressure, etc.)

Google doesn’t rank you because your content is “trustworthy”… but it does rank you higher if your site shows signals that suggest trustworthiness.

Backlinks and how they’re handled today isn’t the same as how they’ve historically been handled.

Backlinks have been a direct ranking factor since the very beginning of Google. They were foundational to how Google revolutionised search in the late 1990s.

PageRank is the origin of Google’s ranking magic, and it’s still relevant today (though much more evolved and hidden under the hood). PageRank is Google’s original algorithm, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. It was based on the idea that a link from one webpage to another is a vote of trust. Not all votes are equal, though; Links from high authority pages carry more weight.

Every page had a PageRank score (originally 0–10). Pages passed on a portion of their score (or “link juice”) through each dofollow link. More inbound links = higher PageRank = higher rankings.

PageRank still exists (Internally). Google still uses modernised versions of PageRank as part of its ranking systems. It’s now just one component among hundreds of signals, including:

• Content quality
• Mobile usability
• Page speed
• E-E-A-T-related signals
• User engagement data (e.g. clicks, dwell time)

Once Google’s pagerank became known as a powerful ranking signal, people quickly started trying to game the system to manipulate rankings. Link farms, private blog networks, comment spam, linking schemes, paid links, footer and sidebar spam were all measures used to try and gain better rankings.

The problem Google had was that the manipulation could lead to irrelevant results ranking, and as Google’s relevant results were what set them apart from other search engines, this wasn’t a tenable situaiton.

Google introduced the Penguin Algorithm (2012) which penalised sites for manipulative link building. In 2016 Google started hiding page rank scores.

In 2016, Google officially removed PageRank from the public toolbar (though they had stopped updating it years before). SEOs suddenly lost the one metric they had been using to gauge a site’s link strength and credibility.

When Google stopped showing public PageRank scores, Moz stepped in with one of the most influential tools in modern SEO: Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA).

DA is a score (1–100) that predicts how well a domain is likely to rank in search results, based primarily on:

• Backlink quantity
• Link quality
• Link diversity

Moz crawls the web and builds a huge link graph (similar to how Google does it) to assign these scores. Think of DA as Moz’s best guess at how strong and authoritative a domain appears from a link-based perspective.

PA is similar, but:

• Focuses on individual pages, not whole domains.
• Used to predict how likely a single page is to rank based on its backlinks.

DA and PA are not Google metrics. Google doesn’t use them. These are a bit like a “best guess” equivalent of something Google used to do that’s now evolved in to something else and works along side a bunch of other ranking factors.

The key point here is that although backlinks do affect ranking, there are also other ranking factors, that affect a website’s position in search engine results.

It’s believed that there are around 200 ranking factors.

That said some of these are speculative, as Google doesn’t explicitly state all ranking factors. The main problem with trying to deduce ranking factors is that it can take time for a changed ranking factor to affect rankings. Let’s say you change one ranking factors each month. It can take up to a year for a ranking factor change to have an affect. After a year ranking changes, but how do you know which of the twelve changed factors caused the ranking change.

Google also update their algorithm as well. This effectively changes how is assessed. In 2023, there were over 4000 algorithm updates. This makes the Google side of things very variable.

When you carry out a proper experiment, you’d usually have a controlled variable which stays the same over the course of the experiment. You’d use this to effectively validate a change you’re seeing in your experiment.

Because the Google algorithm changes, there isn’t a controlled variable in this capacity. Due to this, you can’t really carry out an experiment to prove or disprove ranking factors.

People will state that they’ve proven ranking factors, and that they’ve carried out experiments that validate them. Whilst these aren’t completely valid experiments, they are usually based on experience, and situations specific to SEO that have been seen first hand.

Really, what I’m saying here is that while there are people that do have a lot of SEO experience, and these people are, at least to a degree, worth listening to, the only people that really know what’s going on for sure, is Google themselves.

That said, there is some sensible concepts that you can gain an understanding of when it comes to SEO.

Although competition itself isn’t really a ranking factor it does affect your rankings.

The more competition you have, the harder it is to rank.

If you’re the only person in the whole world that provides a certain product, when someone searches for that product, they’ll most likely find your site if it mentions the product. This is because you have no competition.

Local SEO is easier than national SEO due to competition. If you’re competing locally, you’ll have less competitors. Due to the fewer number of competitors, SEO is easier as it only needs to be better than SEO that this small number of competitors, to out rank them.

National SEO is harder due to the larger number of competitors. If you’re competing nationally your SEO has to be better than a greater number of competitors. Due to the increased number of competitors there’s an increased chance that some of these have really good SEO, so your SEO would have to be better than “really good” for you to outrank these guys.

The key point here is that SEO and ranking is very relative to what your competition is doing, and how many competitors you have.

Your on page ranking factors are a combination of your content (which should be relevant and engaging) your technical SEO (such as links working and your pages not erroring) and user experience (fast page loading times, a logically laid out and useable website, and adhering to best practices such as background and text colours having adequate levels of contrast).

Your pages have to be quick to load, be usable, informative, easy to read and navigate around.

These factors combined affect bounce rate (people navigating away from your site’s pages) which is a ranking factor… even though it’s not actually something in the content of the pages that you control.

Off page ranking factors include backlinks, social signals (such as users sharing site pages on social media), and the overall reputation of you brand. Whilst it might seem a bit unfair to use non-website related factors to influence the ranking of a website, there is more to a company than just the website itself, and this in turn can influence ranking.

An example of an off page factor that could affect ranking might be a large number of negative Google reviews left about your company. Why would Google promote a company with such negative feedback?

As you can probably tell by now, there’s an awful lot of different factors that affect your website’s ranking.

All of these factors combined give what’s effectively an overall “score”, and this score is represented by how well your website ranks in search engine results.

Nobody really knows how this “score” is calculated, and how much weight different ranking factors are given. Does the age of the domain mean more score than a well fast loading website? Probably not. Does a website being regularly shared on social media have a greater influence on score than all the website links working correctly? Well it might, we don’t know for sure.

At this point, it makes sense to picture yourself as Google. Google want to serve relevant, helpful search results. Providing relevant search results is very much Google’s key selling point, and why people use Google so frequently. Google also want to serve high quality websites. Is ranking a page that’s very relevant that loads slowly to Google’s benefit? Does it make people think it’s worth using Google to be served this informative yet, painful to use website? Probably not. A site like this probably won’t rank even though it’s informative.

Key point here: You’re going to need to publish a site that Google are happy to serve, and that gives value to Google’s users. This is likely to be a product of a collection of various ranking factors, rather than just one or two being done well, and the rest being ignored.

Just as bounce rate gives Google an idea of what website visitors think, backlinks give Google an idea of what other website owners think. Historically, as I’ve mentioned above, backlinks have been a major ranking factor. Although these are now part of a bigger picture, most SEO people will agree that backlinks are still quite a major ranking factor.

The main problem with backlinks is that they’re costly. Not necessarily always in a monetary sense, but in time. Backlink outreach does take time, knowing how to outreach and who to outreach to involves experience, so a backlink cost comes in the form of an employee’s salary, or what a company pays an SEO agency.

The short answer is: It depends.

If you’re competing with someone who has a decent backlink profile, the answer is most likely “no you can’t rank with no backlinks”.

If you’re competing nationally, the answer is most likely “no you can’t rank with no backlinks”.

If you’re competing locally, or don’t have a large amount of competition you might well be able to rank with no (or minimal) backlinks, but you’ll probably have to do very well in other ranking factors to do so.

There may be some exceptions to the above. For example, if you have site A that ONLY has a good backlink profile, but is slow to load, and contains content that’s poor quality competing with site B that loads quickly, contains engaging content, gets shared a lot on social media and has a large amount of 5 star reviews, site B might well be in with a chance of ranking. That said, it’s not often that you’ll come across a site that ONLY has a good backlink profile. If effort has been put in to obtaining backlinks, it’s likely to be the case that effort has been put in to content as well.

If you’re competing locally, or don’t have a large amount of competition you might well be able to rank with no backlinks, but you’ll probably have to do very well in other ranking factors to do so.

This is quite allegorical, just to forewarn you.

I make websites on the side (don’t tell anyone) for local small businesses and sole traders. The county that I live in isn’t that populous, and a lot of small businesses don’t have websites (they tend to use social media to promote themselves). These factors work in my favour.

I was approached by a lady who needed a website for a business she was starting as a sole trader. Her target audience was centred around a mid sized town, and the surrounding area. She was providing care support services, such as helping older people with their shopping, or helping people with learning do things like managing benefit applications. Some of her competitors were providing a very similar service, and others, such as care homes and social support, were providing similar services as part of a wider offering.

She’d made her entire website using Kanva, and just needed me to get it online, and “do the SEO”. Part of the problem with me doing the SEO was that there was some on page SEO (H1, H2, text etc) that she didn’t want changed. She also didn’t have any social media, and the other problem was that she didn’t want her address mentioned online. Anywhere.

The lack of address online meant that I couldn’t sign her up with any business directories, which is usually a go to for sole traders to gain a few backlinks.

Needless to say I was very limited when it came to the “do the SEO” part. The only thing I could really think to do was “everything else as best I could” and console myself with not having a lot of killer competition.

The direction that I decided to take was to try and ace the metrics in pagespeed insights, and leverage schema markup.

Although these customers tend to use fairly standard shared web hosting, good pagespeed metrics are entirely possible. I managed to get 100’s for performance, best practices and SEO in pagespeed insights. Accessibility was 95% due to the colour of a link, but the site owner wasn’t keen on the colour scheme being changed. What can you do?

Remember the “score” I was talking about ealier? What I’m doing here is maximising that score using factors I am able to use, to make up for factors that I’m not able to use.

This approach did work. Her site is at the top of page one for her preferred local search terms, and has been for about 6 months now. With no backlinks.

Fast forward 3 months and I get a similar job. This time, it’s for a stone mason who wants to appeal to half the county, offering about 6 different stone mason orientated services. There’s a bit more flexibility on content, but there’s also more competition due to the larger geographical area, and there being more stone masons or traders providing competing services. Again there’s an “I don’t want my address online”.

I take the same approach (aim for performance and user experience), but this time leveraging content as best I can. The customer checks the draft, and asks me to remove a lot of the on page SEO opportunities (most of the ones you can see as a website visitor, H1, H2, on page text). What can you do?

This site has been on page one since it went live for desired search terms which are roughly:
[service] east [county]

With two backlinks.

The I get another job. This time, it’s for a plasterer that covers the entire county. Gulp. The situation is roughly the same as the above, so I apply the same methodology, in part to see what happens.

This is where the ranking with no backlinks idea comes a bit unstuck. This site is one page one for some search terms that are a bit more localised, and top of page two for some county wide search terms.

This gives you an idea of the glass ceiling that you hit with a lack of backlinks. Where that ceiling is exactly is most likely due to competition and their SEO.

When I was looking in to this customers competition, the site at the top of page one for the mist desired search term is:
[county]plasterers.com

A lot of the backlinks for this domain come from websites like:
[county]constructionandcarpentry.co.uk
[county]driveways.co.uk
[county]landscapingandpaving.co.uk

All these sites are made by the same company (it says so in each site’s footer). They’re also for different companies if the contact telephone numbers are anything to go by.

So really, what you’ve got here, is a website company making websites for people, then linking these websites to each other to gain some backlinks. While this does sound like the kind of thing that Google might penalise for, they obviously haven’t done this yet, otherwise I wouldn’t be seeing one of these sites on page one of Google.

Part of the glass ceiling I’ve reached with the plasterers website is due to optimising for a geographical area that contains a competitor that’s used a web designer that’s created their one miniature backlink network. In this context, I won’t be able to beat that competitor’s ranking without backlinks.

The reason I’ve told you all this is to provide a practical example of how competition and how their backlink profile affects whether you can rank without backlinks.

I haven’t though have I? Because I can’t. I’ve got no control subject, and I don’t control how Google rank sites, how often their algorithm updates, and what the web site design company that made the competing plastering website is doing.

That said, the plastering website that ranks on page one has pagespeed scores of:
Performance: 62
Accessibility: 76
Best practices: 96
SEO: 92

And an average page word count of 557, and the appearance of the navigation menu changes when you navigate between pages.

Although this sounds a bit big headed, here are the respective statistics for the website I made for a competing company:
Performance: 99
Accessibility: 100
Best practices: 100
SEO: 100

And an average page word count of 882.

This doesn’t exactly align with compelling content and a good user experience outweighing backlinks as a ranking factor.

Obviously I’m only looking at a small section of ranking factors, and there’s other factors such as domain age (the domain I’m using is a brand new domain registration).

Being completely honest, nobody knows for sure (perhaps other than Google themselves), but it might help to imagine what would happen if search engines did openly state that backlinks were a major ranking factor.

The net result of this would most likely be that marketing departments then focus on backlinking as a priority, rather than content. Given enough time, this would mean that the overall quality of content on the internet as a whole would decrease, people would use it less, I wouldn’t have to write blog posts like this any more (phew!) and less people would be using search engines due to this general decline in the quality of information available on the internet.

I’ll completely admit that I’m theorising here, and I’ve got no way of doing an experiment that proves or disproves this theory, but what else can I do?

It would be morally wrong not to mention this. Don’t buy backlinks. This can do a lot of damage to your website’s reputation, and rankings. I completely appreciate that this contradicts what I’ve said above, but if you’re thinking about doing this, it’s probably not going to work out well.

You’re probably thinking something like “what should I do then?”. The best advice I can give you here is to engage with an SEO agency that has a proven track record. Gain the benefits of their experience and knowledge, as there’s a lot of contradictory information on the internet. I include this blog post in that!

It is possible to rank with no backlinks provided that you’re not competing with someone who is using backlinks to rank.

The greater the geographical area you appeal to, the more competitors you’re likely to have.

The more competitors you have, the more chance you have of competing with someone using backlinks to rank.

If you compete with someone using backlinks to rank, you don’t have much chance of outranking them.

Don’t buy backlinks!

Engage with an SEO agency that has a proven track record if you need help.