Not Building Backlinks - Month 2

Month 2 and still around. Actually I am quite pleased with the progress. Traffic has tripled compared to the first month. And revenue keeps adding up. Almost reached $100 dollars by the end of the 2nd month.

The major difference between the first and second month is that I no longer have to work on the design elements of the website. The second month was spent adding content to the website and blog.

Traffic Is Still Low

By the end of the second month the average number of visitors per day is 50. Most are referrals from forums I visit and responses to blog comments I make on other blogs.

The big problem is that I still receive very little organic search traffic [organic definition]. In the first month 19 visitors came from Google search. In the second month 35 visitors arrived via search engines. Not much – lots of room for improvement. This website cannot be considered successful unless search engines send me lots of traffic.

To receive more traffic from Google search I need backlinks [backlinks definition]. But backlinks are hard to come by. There is no shortage of advice on how to increase backlinks:

Link Exchange – exchange links with another website. They backlink to you and in return you backlink to them.
Buy backlinks – pay money to a webmaster to backlink to your website.
Link Farm – join a group of websites which all backlink to each other.
Leave comments on 'follow' blogs – find blogs that do not include the 'rel=nofollow' in their comment section. Then add a comment with a link back to your website.
Add website to Directories – Directories are a list of website/blogs that people can find by searching through specific categories.

All these methods create backlinks. But the problem is that they go against the key purpose of backlinks. Google uses backlinks as a measure of how interesting other people think your website is. If somebody reads your website and finds it so interesting that they link to it, Google takes it as an indication that you have a good site.

Contrary to the intent of backlinks, the methods above create backlinks not because you have a good website; they create backlinks because you make them. Either by paying for them, exchanging them, or creating them yourself. Two crappy websites cannot get any real backlinks so they exchange between themselves. Crappy website 1 links to crappy website 2 and vice versa. Or, because nobody is linking to your website you have to go and link to it yourself via comments on blogs. And the lowest of all, is paying for backlinks – nobody links to your website so you pay them to. It is like buying a trophy. All these methods defeat the purpose of backlinks – to measure how good a website is.

If nobody is backlinking to your website then it probably needs improvement, or you need to wait. The solution is not to create your own backlinks. It might bring in traffic for a short period of time – but it will be fleeting because your website is not good. People will come, leave quickly, and never comeback. All the claims about creating backlinks are true – they do bring traffic. But only for a short time. People will come to see your trophy and for a short time think that you are a great basketball player. But only until they see you play.

On the other hand if you have authentic backlinks. Backlinks created by people who really find your website interesting then the traffic will increase for the long term. Because you have a quality site.

A Website Is Like a Restaurant

If you have a good restaurant with exceptional food and service then you will succeed. It will be slow at the beginning. Until the word gets around about your restaurant. For the first six months only a few visitors trickle in. You are operating at a loss. But those few people will return and they will tell their friends about it. A year later the restaurant is a success. You have a good restaurant so visitors do the marketing for you and the traffic builds.

On the other hand, if you have a restaurant with flies in the soup and a waiter who cannot smile then you will fail. At the beginning you will have a few visitors but they will not return and they will not tell their friends. 6 months later your traffic will not increase. You could try a shifty marketing technique like adding the byline, “Home of the World Famous Hot Dog” to entice customers. This technique works for a quick increase in traffic. People will come to the restaurant. But they will not come back after tasting the 5 day old soggy wiener. If the restaurant sucks then no amount of marketing can make it a success.

Same thing applies to websites. If the content is poor then no amount of backlink building can help it. You will get quick shots of traffic but it will not last. It will not generate revenue or returning visitors.

Do Not Build Backlinks – Let Them Build Themselves

This is what I concluded by the end of month 2. Reading posts on forums and blogs about creating backlinks I have come to see creating backlinks as cheating the system. Trying to get traffic unnaturally. You receive traffic not because you have a good site – but because you created your own backlinks.

Google is a multi-billion dollar company. They have the best programmers in the world whose sole purpose is to make sure that only good websites reach the top of Google search. Techniques to bring a crappy website to the top of Google search might work for a little while. But sooner or later it will be discovered by Google and cease to work. If you have to create your own backlinks you are fighting against the stream. Actually a raging river, the biggest river of them all – Google. In the end they will beat you. They are at the top because they can consistently bring the best websites to the top of Google search. If your website is not a good website Google will do everything it can to keep you away from the top of search results. You might win a battle every now and then, but you will lose the war.

This Website Has No Backlinks

By the end of month 2 this website still has no quality backlinks. Nobody has found this website interesting enough to link to it. This means that this website is still not good enough for anybody to backlink to. But that is OK. It is still early. Good websites take time. I will continue to add content and wait patiently. All the time saved by not building backlinks will be used to add content to the website. If the website is good then people will start to backlink to it. And it will reach somewhere near the top of Google search. If it is not good then I will receive no backlinks and the website will rightfully fail. It will fail because nobody finds it interesting – the best reason of all.