Can you Rank on Google WITHOUT Links? [OSEO-03]

Hey guys, this is Tim Solo from Ahrefs, and right now you're watching episode number three of the oversimplified SEO show. In my previous episode I explained you how to rank for any keyword in Google. And what I suggested is that you should build a lot of links to this page. So in this episode, I want to show you how to rank without links. So this is the post on the Ahrefs blog with the previous episode of the show. And as you can tell from the title of this post, my intent was to target the keyword how to rank number one in Google. Let's see how well this post ranks for this keyword. Let's scroll down to the bottom of this page, and you'll see that the post on Ahrefs blog ranks number 10, because the rest are Google ads. But the funny thing is the the previous search result. It's a slide-share presentation that ranks right above us. Let's compare these two pages in Ahrefs Site Explorer and see if we can find something interesting. I'll start with the Ahrefs article. So I put it into Site Explorer and what I see is that it has 13 backlinks from two referring domains. Not much actually. But let's see what we have for this slide-share presentation. I will open another instance of Site Explorer and here's the funny thing. It doesn't have any backlinks at all. In the previous episode of the show, I told you that you should build more links than your competitors if you want to outrank them. So how come this slide-share presentation doesn't have any links at all, but it still ranks better than our post at Ahrefs blog that has 13 backlinks? And the answer is pretty much in front of you. It's the domain rating. As you can see, the domain rating of Ahrefs blog is 66, while the domain rating of slide-share website is 81, which is quite a lot bigger. And that's what helps it rank better, even without any backlinks pointing to the page. Domain rating is a very powerful ranking factor. And in fact, when SEOs can't rank for some keyword with their own website, they might utilize powerful domains like slide-share or YouTube in order to hack their way to the top of Google. And actually, if we go back to the search results, we'll see that there's a YouTube video ranking at spot number 5. Let's see if this video has any links at all. Well, actually, it does have a single backlink. But as you can see, the domain rating is totally insane. And that's what makes it easily rank at number 5. For a pretty competitive keyword, how to rank number 1 in Google? So that's it, guys. This is how you rank in Google without any backlinks at all. You just need a solid domain rating to make it happen. But what's domain rating after all? It's the combined power of all backlinks pointing to all pages of your website. So when you build links to any individual pages on your website, this helps to improve your domain rating. And then when your domain rating is solid enough, it may help you to rank for some keyword without having any links pointing to this page. So that's it. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. And I'm waiting for your comments and questions below. Bye.