“Any thoughts?”

What’s the quickest route to spamville by car avoiding motorways?

Any thoughts?

“Back Links are not as important as everyone makes out”

The above statment refers to views such as this:

• a website cannot be found by Google without a link
• a website will not be indexed by Google unless there is a backlink
• a website cannot achieve any sort of decent rank without a backlink

I had noticed that the necessity of a backlink may no longer be the case and wanted see how far simply ‘telling google about the website’ and adding content would get it. Check out the posts leading up to this one as I logged as much as I felt was necessary.

what was the competition like when you had #30 page ranks etc?

The last time I had checked ‘competition’ (only as far as pages that contain the phrase) was 26th January. See http://www.manchesterseo.org.uk/competition-for-manchester-seo/
Manchester SEO is not very competitive as a converting term IMO and it’s very much a vanity rank but when you manually look through the SERPs there are a large number of websites and blogs that are ‘optimised’ for the phrase (more than 30 at a guess).

“Appreciate any feedback because my views are content and back links are king.”

If I had to choose I would say content is King purely because I have found that websites can be indexed and appear without backlinks purely based on the content. When it comes to SERP visibility the need for backlinks as an ongoing provision or as a ‘starter boost’ may not be necessary for a good many websites with niche markets from sole traders to SMEs and even strong brands. A Google local (ahem sorry Google Places – why did they change that?)listing and a simple website (with the right content) could be all a business needs to get what they want from that website.

I’m not saying backlinks are not important, just that there are other factors that come into it and that you don’t need a backlink for Google to ‘find’ and ‘index’ a website anymore. Clearly it’s not something that can be confirmed by doing an analysis today since there are a couple of backlinks present so the reader is encouraged to use what I’ve recorded as something to consider and explore further themselves. It does require patience though

Also what was the competition like when you had #30 page ranks etc?

Appreciate any feedback because my views are content and back links are king.