So if you throw enough at the shit at the wall, eventually something will stick, in the sense that someone will link to it. That hardly seems like a viable or repeatable "strategy" for increasing search rank.
My personal experience with this, after paying for months of professional content writing, is that you get a few people posting links on their zero-PageRank Wordpress blogs and you get a few people attempting to share links or spread the word, but over-aggressive forum admins have filters that automatically remove all off-domain hyperlinks, and, in some cases, openly-hostile admins will remove any link to or mention of anything that isn't their own site. One of the largest forums in our niche had this policy; if you didn't pay them $5k for an ad package, any mention of your site whatsoever would be removed. You also get competitors, often large ones, blatantly ripping/reskinning your content without giving any credit, and then everyone shares the link from the better-known source instead.
Google claims that good content is key, but what they mean is that "good content will get links, so links mean content is good, so we just count links".
The premise that links correlate with quality is no longer valid in 2017. People no longer puts links on the internet to content they like, at least not in the format that Google expects and/or is able to access. The simple fact is that Google is made for the web past, and that it doesn't work on the web as it stands.
Our competitor had only 2-3 publicly visible pages that informed on the mechanics of their service and provided 0 related content. We had a blog that featured new posts with updates that were relevant to the niche almost-daily, including fully original high-quality photo essays with abundant explanatory text. Despite this, with a little bit of spam voodoo, they blew us away on SEO in every non-long-tail keyword.
My personal experience with this, after paying for months of professional content writing, is that you get a few people posting links on their zero-PageRank Wordpress blogs and you get a few people attempting to share links or spread the word, but over-aggressive forum admins have filters that automatically remove all off-domain hyperlinks, and, in some cases, openly-hostile admins will remove any link to or mention of anything that isn't their own site. One of the largest forums in our niche had this policy; if you didn't pay them $5k for an ad package, any mention of your site whatsoever would be removed. You also get competitors, often large ones, blatantly ripping/reskinning your content without giving any credit, and then everyone shares the link from the better-known source instead.
Google claims that good content is key, but what they mean is that "good content will get links, so links mean content is good, so we just count links".
The premise that links correlate with quality is no longer valid in 2017. People no longer puts links on the internet to content they like, at least not in the format that Google expects and/or is able to access. The simple fact is that Google is made for the web past, and that it doesn't work on the web as it stands.
Our competitor had only 2-3 publicly visible pages that informed on the mechanics of their service and provided 0 related content. We had a blog that featured new posts with updates that were relevant to the niche almost-daily, including fully original high-quality photo essays with abundant explanatory text. Despite this, with a little bit of spam voodoo, they blew us away on SEO in every non-long-tail keyword.