We have heard rumors that in the good ‘ol days of SEO you didn’t even need any content on a page to rank for a target keyword. You could rank a page simply by pointing links at it with exact match anchor text.
While we have doubts that you could obtain significant ranking without having content on a page today, we wanted to see if you could at least index a page solely on the exact match anchor text pointing to it.
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I don’t know how old you guys are but I was born in 2010. I don’t really remember the good old days of SEO. I think I was sitting in a John Limbocker conference a couple of years ago and he was talking about the days of SEO where you could just fire backlinks on a page and rank it for a keyword even though it has no content on it.
He was claiming that you could have a page that is basically devoid of content and fire links at it with exact match anchor texts and that page would rank for that particular keyword.
Dori: I am here to verify that that is absolutely true. I used to do it as well and I used to brag about it. I could rank a blank page with just exact match keywords.
My thought was, that was probably impossible but what if we have a page that has some content on it although not optimized for that keyword and then we fire just a ton of links on it. Could we get it to move on a particular keyword phrase? People talk about links are king, content is king, no its link, etc. Well if it is just one or the other, if can we just do it with links? We know we can rank a page with just content and then links.
Now I was wondering if we could do it the other way, no content and links and what we found was that we fired a ton of links on this – we fired 4000 drip feed links and 20000 Fiverr links. We indexed a bunch of them and the target page does not rank for that exact match keyword.
Right now, I took a look at it and I think there were 200 of the links that we built are actually indexing for the keyword but the target page is not.
Dori: Did you just over optimize a page by firing links to it?
No, it never showed.
Dori: It never indexed?
In the test environment, when you spam, you would still see the movement. You will see the up. It might get penalized and it will drop but we will see the movement of it and we will see it appear but the target page never appeared by sending exact match anchor texts at it.
Dori: It never indexed at all. So you were throwing links at it before it indexed?
Never. It has been crawled. It was optimized for a different keyword. The idea was that, text on it that was not necessarily the anchor text and then we threw 24000 links at it with different anchor text to see if it would index for that other word.
That doesn’t mean that you cannot win secondary words for having a particular keyword and they have a good strategy with that but just doing that alone is not going to do it.