[gnaritas]

If you provide good content, google will find it and back-links will build themselves naturally from organic traffic; he's objecting to the unnatural building of back-links via spamming the Internet. No one likes when they google something and the results are full of spam sites and affiliate links.

[ivm]

Google will find it but it will not place it on top of your competitors if your site has low authority, i.e. small amount of backlinks.

So you will not get any organic traffic because your site is not visible. On-page keyword optimization is a very weak factor compared to the number of backlinks from "powerful" sites.

Cold emails to relevant site owners and bloggers is no more spam than "Show HN" is spam.

[gnaritas]

As I just said, back-links will come naturally and organically if the content is good and then it will have authority. Good things get found, again and again, it's what Google exists to do and they're pretty good at doing it even for sites that don't try and artificially pump up their back-links. Most sites don't get natural organic traffic because they suck, not because they don't rank high enough. Authority doesn't come from back-links, back-links come from Authority. Don't confuse cause for effect.

[ivm]

They do not come naturally, speaking from experience. Our site is placed on the 2nd to 3rd pages for the vital search queries that our product needs for long-term survival despite relatively low competition.

But most of the first page results have many times more backlinks. We've got less than a dozen organically during the last year.

[gnaritas]

> They do not come naturally, speaking from experience.

Yes they do, speaking from experience. They aren't coming naturally for you because you're competing in a saturated market or a small market selling things people don't really want or need. Your content probably isn't useful for any reason outside of selling something, which isn't the kind of thing people will naturally link to. If your site isn't useful to people who don't want to buy something, you're not going to attract organic growth. Write interesting content people want to share, and they'll link to it without any marketing efforts. If you can't get organic growth, your content is not interesting.

[ivm]

So you are saying that one needs to pick a mildly occupied niche in a relatively high demand for the organic approach to work.

I understand the possibility, but this will not work that well:

– for any market where you have competitors with decent content on the first page already

– in future because the number of niches in this state decreases each day

A company who wants to compete in more or less established market will have no choice but work on link building.

[gnaritas]

> A company who wants to compete in more or less established market will have no choice but work on link building.

Link building isn't adding any value to your site; you're merely trying to game the search engine who doesn't want to be gamed and who actively resists gaming by hiring some of the smartest people in the world to ferret out and eliminate your tricks. Google wants good content, not back links (back links are only a proxy they use to rate quality and only one of many), focus on good content and the rest will follow automatically without gaming the search engine which is only ever a temporary win at best. Trying to continually "trick google" by creating more links to your site that natural traffic would warrant is not a good long term strategy. Creating content people want is always a good strategy and works long term and removes you from the trying to trick google game which removes you from being taken out by a change in their algo aimed squarely at you fake back linkers.

[gnaritas]

No, I'm saying content that users find helpful and useful will get rank naturally. Tutorials for example, teach people something, they'll link to it. No one likes spam, you can't dress up spam and make it useful, if the only point of your site is selling stuff, you're always going to be fighting for rank and traffic because your site isn't useful. Build a site that's useful first, monetize it second; sites that only exist to make money will not get organic traffic, they don't offer anything useful.

People have to want to come to your site and get something useful for free, interesting content. Look at your site, take off all the products, what's left... if it's nothing, your site will never attract organic traffic because it's a spam site hocking someone else's products. Build a site that attracts and builds an audience first, then monetize it with relevant links to affiliate stuff and you won't have to always play the SEO game. SEO is for shitty sites that don't offer anything of value in and of themselves.

Viral is just another word for extremely interesting, but normal interesting has quite a long tail. However viral marketing is the proof of what I'm saying, first be interesting, that gets eyeballs, and eyeballs can be monetized. If you're just a shopping cart site selling someone else's products, you have no draw, why would I ever come to your site, I can just go to amazon or one of the other big name sites. So you need either something interesting, or something unique you're selling I can't find anywhere else.

This guy https://www.culturehustle.com/collections/frontpage/products... can barely keep up with demand, you know why... because I can't find another product like that anywhere, it's unique, so it doesn't have to be interesting.