Dare to solve this SEO puzzle?

[sofomor]

Hello SEO Gurus,

We all have been optimizing sites, giving suggestions and have an eye on the SEO industry all the time. But i want you guys to answer this questions, or rather case study:

A - Would a CONTENT based website that has juicy content, has many of its pages indexed and has best SEO techniques employed GET RANKED if there are NO INBOUND LINKS AT ALL???

B - Would a complete FLASH based website with every internal link being embedded in flash menus, not a single instance of text except Titles and meta info GETS RANKED if it is LINKED by all the top notch websites with highest PR like GOOGLE, YAHOO, CNN, DIGG, ADOBE and many many more...?

I'm serious, is it INBOUND LINKS to a FLASH/IMAGE based website would make it to FIRST page of SEs

Or

Excellent SEO content for SEs with no IBL (inbound links) would make it to the FIRST page?


No arguments please, just calculations and your SEO brains.

Thank you

[inertia]

I would say that the site with no links will find it very hard to achieve a high ranking. The flash site will rank better because of the in bound links but will still find it hard to achieve a high ranking for any competitive keywords.

By having no links you are essentially isolating your content site from the www. How did Google index the pages in the first place? Manual submission?

Depending on which keywords you are wishing to be on the first page for, i would say that neither would make it to the first page.

[incrediblehelp]

Well for Google the algo is weighted more towards the back links, but in the flash situation it is only one document and probably can only rank for so many keywords.

Either way this is not a clear cut answer.

[monfis]

My two cents of experience to your questions:

First the page without inbound links.
With a well done onpage optimization and manual site submission you can achieve relativ good rankings - but only for a limited time. After that time, seems to depend on competition and search frequency for you keywords, it will decrease it's initial ranking positions.

With your flash example it's a bit different.
You can achieve good ranking positions as incrediblehelp says, but you need a lot more of inbound links for similair positions than a non flash page - and the keywords the flash page will rank for are mainly, not completely, limited to what the spiders can read in your domain name, title and meta tags.

I said mainly, not completely because you can achieve rankings for keywords that are not found on the page if they appear in the anchor text of your inbound links.

Another often overlooked technique to better flash page ranking is the use of the noframe tag.

<noframe>your in flash version visible text goes here</noframe> used within the body tags of your flash page.

[sofomor]

I agree to a point that on-page seo makes a page favorable in the eyes of a search engine, but no link building done would not help "it" get any where near the first page or good rankings.

Even if its a single flash based page and if we all agree that "linking improves ranking", i think its the powerful in bound links from the TOP NOTCH pages indexed by the search engines that would make it rank good!

Thank you

[ash]

Search for "nike" and you will find a Flash-only website. Once you get past a certain point of fame/notoriety in the web context, (which includes lots of quality links) you can break rules that smaller sites dare not.

[chandrika]

A week ago when this post went up, I wanted to see if Google would include a page that had no inbound links.

So I found some non keyword with zero competition, did 2 pags, same content, one flash, one plain html, applied standard SeO. It is looking like it wont be indexed without an inbound link, but I will leave them there, thir sitmaps are submitted, see if google ever includes them.

I will do 2 mor, same thing but give them a head start with an inbound to each to try and speed things up, just so I can s which comes up first.

Might as wll put the links here, if thats ok...(welcome to remove if not)

Mugabugata (http://www.findallsorts.com/3/mugabugata.html)
mugabugata (http://www.findallsorts.com/4/mugabugata.html)

[monfis]

I agree to a point that on-page seo makes a page favorable in the eyes of a search engine, but no link building done would not help "it" get any where near the first page or good rankings.

Even if its a single flash based page and if we all agree that "linking improves ranking", i think its the powerful in bound links from the TOP NOTCH pages indexed by the search engines that would make it rank good!

Thank you

Well it's a bit late for proof, the last site I did for a friend shows now 7 real inbound links from 3 different sites on Yahoo (still none on Google), but achieved meanwhile about 50 top ten rankings (50% is # 1) for it's desired niche. (It was not much less when we started without any link)

[Peter (IMC)]

Hello SEO Gurus,

We all have been optimizing sites, giving suggestions and have an eye on the SEO industry all the time. But i want you guys to answer this questions, or rather case study:

A - Would a CONTENT based website that has juicy content, has many of its pages indexed and has best SEO techniques employed GET RANKED if there are NO INBOUND LINKS AT ALL???

B - Would a complete FLASH based website with every internal link being embedded in flash menus, not a single instance of text except Titles and meta info GETS RANKED if it is LINKED by all the top notch websites with highest PR like GOOGLE, YAHOO, CNN, DIGG, ADOBE and many many more...?

I'm serious, is it INBOUND LINKS to a FLASH/IMAGE based website would make it to FIRST page of SEs

Or

Excellent SEO content for SEs with no IBL (inbound links) would make it to the FIRST page?


No arguments please, just calculations and your SEO brains.

Thank you

A - As far as Google is concerned it is not possible to have a site indexed without any backlinks. Only in the very beginning after you submitted your site to Google it will get indexed for a while. But if it in the following months doesn't find any links in other sites to your site, then eventually your site will drop out of the index. So what you´re asking is not possible. (though in the very beginning when Google doesn't take PR into account, you can get some high rankings.)

B - Yes, a pure flash site can rank high. But for very few keywords. At best some keywords in the title of that one single pages that can be found and some keywords that may exist in some anchor texts of backlinks.



I'm serious, is it INBOUND LINKS to a FLASH/IMAGE based website would make it to FIRST page of SEs

Or

Excellent SEO content for SEs with no IBL (inbound links) would make it to the FIRST page?
The first does work, the second doesn't work (though in the beginning it might).
You'd be better of to combine the 2,.. inbound links + Excellent content.

[chandrika]

A week ago when this post went up, I wanted to see if Google would include a page that had no inbound links.

So I found some non keyword with zero competition, did 2 pags, same content, one flash, one plain html, applied standard SeO. It is looking like it wont be indexed without an inbound link, but I will leave them there, thir sitmaps are submitted, see if google ever includes them.

I will do 2 mor, same thing but give them a head start with an inbound to each to try and speed things up, just so I can s which comes up first.

Might as wll put the links here, if thats ok...(welcome to remove if not)

Mugabugata (http://www.findallsorts.com/3/mugabugata.html)
mugabugata (http://www.findallsorts.com/4/mugabugata.html)

Well these results are interesting because even though I only posted links to 2 pages, another page on my site, with no inbound links at all is in the search results
mugabugata - Google Search (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mugabugata&hl=en&filter=0)

Actually strangely there are 3 results from my site. The page in the folder called "2" has no inbound links and yet has been listed. Actually the page doesnt even exist, it just had a sitemap, and redirects to a 404 as it doesnt exist, but interesting that it is listed with no backlinks except from the sitemap, it was where I was originally going to put the test pages.

Anyway, so as guessed the html version of the page is at the top, so now its just a case of seeing how many backlinks to the flash page will make it outrank the html page.

[activeco]

Good work Chandrika.
However, maybe you should have done one version with a different unique keyword, keeping exactly the same concept.
In the current way you never know if it is flash alone or duplicate content issue in case they can still follow flash.
Keep us posted.

[amjad_you]

A - Would a CONTENT based website that has juicy content, has many of its pages indexed and has best SEO techniques employed GET RANKED if there are NO INBOUND LINKS AT ALL???

I'll simply say NO.


has best SEO techniques employed

After doing on-page optimization, a simple SEO technique is submit it to Directories.
How can it be "best SEO technique" ??

Since the directory submission also make inbound links, but according you there is no Inbound Links At All. On Page optimization is just a beginning of SEO.



B - Would a complete FLASH based website with every internal link being embedded in flash menus, not a single instance of text except Titles and meta info GETS RANKED if it is LINKED by all the top notch websites with highest PR like GOOGLE, YAHOO, CNN, DIGG, ADOBE and many many more...?

I'm serious, is it INBOUND LINKS to a FLASH/IMAGE based website would make it to FIRST page of SEs

Sure it will rank, if the anchor, Title, and Description, support each other.



Excellent SEO content for SEs with no IBL (inbound links) would make it to the FIRST page?

Excellent SEO content to justify your position
IBL (inbound links) to justify your trustworthiness

If you want to rank forever Both are Important



No arguments please, just calculations and your SEO brains.


How can you do the calculation if equation is not complete?
It will just raise the argument.

[amjad_you]

Well these results are interesting because even though I only posted links to 2 pages, another page on my site, with no inbound links at all is in the search results


A well promoted domain itself is sufficient to give its internal pages a rank in SERPs. All internal pages gets the advantage of being linked with main page/domain. There are thousands of links pointing to Your domain.

According sofomor website (i.e; Domain ) has no IBL

Am I right sofomor??

[amjad_you]

Search for "nike" and you will find a Flash-only website. Once you get past a certain point of fame/notoriety in the web context, (which includes lots of quality links) you can break rules that smaller sites dare not.

Nike ranks only for "Nike" but not for its products. It is not ranking anywhere with "Shoes" which it is known for. It is a well known shoes manufacturer but not rank in 100 (i have searched only till top 100) with "shoes manufacturer".

Any domain can rank high if has some good backlinks only irrespective of anything (except if not banned)