Can you Rank in Google SERP without External Linking

For few years now we’ve heard that marketers should now stop focusing on generating and building links. It is stated worldwide that aggressive link building should be avoided to rank higher in search results as external links aren’t that important now in google algorithms and it is now safe to ignore them.

Understand the relationship between external link and rankings -

Google has designed its algorithm such that not one factor dominate over the other. The correlation between rankings and links pointing to that website have seen to be the highest relation study found. The no. of websites found at the top results had some external links atleast . Out of all results 99.2% of all websites had atleast one external link.

Studies found that almost no website ranked for any competitive phrase that did not have a single external link pointing to them. Although it can happen that a specific page with no external link can rank provided its domain is backed up with  a lot of backlinks.

77% of individual webpages in top results had on link minimum which implies 22% of webpages ranked with no external links at all.

Lets have a look on the data about Links and Rankings :

1. External links do present for competitive searches

If you aim is to rank for keywords which are even remotely competitive than in order to rank without having a single external link is a rare phenomenon. Links could be anything of a social refer to a indirect referral .

     2 .     Individual pages can rank

As long as your domain is linked with external websites it seems possible to rank for individual pages on your site even though those pages does not have any backlinks.

    3.       More links correlate with Higher rankings

Study shows that it is obvious that there is a somewhat strong relation between higher rankings and number of links from unique visitors. No. of unique links were the highest relation derived.

   4.        Scenario when you can rank without links

Yes its fact that ranking is difficult without any single backlink but there’s folks there’s a catch here. Non competitive phrases are much easier to rank for. So if you want website to rank without links you can be successful by targeting keywords with lower traffic and lower competition.

There’s a good reason webmasters feel link building is dead but for newbies lesser familiar with SEO should know the difference in amount of link building required .