[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.

[ivm]

> 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.

[gnaritas]

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.

[ivm]

> 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.

> By calling something a back link, you are specifically referring to Googles page ranking strategy

"A backlink for a given web resource is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink

[gnaritas]

I'm a programmer, obviously I know what a back-link is, and obviously when you're referring to them you're doing so in reference to how Google uses them in page rank, please don't pretend otherwise. I do this for a living, the site I run did 150 million in revenue last year, I'm not talking out of my ass. You want to get pedantic and start quoting me definitions of words, fine, we're done chatting, have a good day.