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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

I think you use a narrow definition of a backlink which is "asking a link to weak content". Asking to add a new app to somebody's "Useful tools for ..." list is link building too.

> Google wants good content, not back links

Google relies on "dofollow" backlinks from big sites more than anything, check different researches on ranking and backlink count correlation.

Google relies on an ever changing definition of what they consider "good content", which may currently include dofollow back-links and may not in the future. Optimize for good content and you don't have to worry about such ever changing implementation details. Trying to figure out how Google currently works is a losing arms race, understanding what Google is trying to do, find good content, and providing it, is a winning strategy.

All those stories about people losing their businesses because Google changed their algorithm, those were people trying to game Google to promote their content higher than it should have been, Google will always win that contest.

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.

> Build a site that attracts and builds an audience first

Who will never find it because you didn't post it anywhere to raise up in ranking because "backlinking is gaming the system and bad".

> SEO is for shitty sites that don't offer anything of value in and of themselves.

Good luck not putting relevant keywords and having PageSpeed score under 50.

You're hung up in figuring out what google does currently and not seeing their goal, good content. There's a vast different between putting your site out there by posting links in a few places so "people" will see it, and posting links so "google" will see it. I have nothing against the former, those are simply links, but it's not about back links, it's about getting the word out to people. Worrying about back links is you trying to game Google, that's a losing game long term. By calling something a back link, you are specifically referring to Googles page ranking strategy which means you're not trying to promote your site to the audience where the link is found, you're trying to make Google think your site is more worthy, sorry, that's just a losing strategy; Google isn't stupid.

We've beaten the subject to death, I'm done.