I share your opinion as well, but at the same time have done extremely well with rich content by itself.
Many times people forget that Google is extremely good at LSI and here is an example which happens more frequent than you think.
I have a client who sells very expensive horse farms. His whole website is about this and very focused on this.
I started noticing lots and lots of traffic coming in for "large tracts of land for sale" after much research and discussion with my customer, we could not find any copy for this search term.
We were amazed on how much traffic Google was sending us for keywords not even existing on the website pages. As a result we created a page and optimized for this, horse farms are very large and we never considered this keyword phrase.
This is not an isolated incident, it happens more frequent than you think about Google trying to figure out what your site is and making determinations on LSI. If you don't know what this it stands for "LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing" just Google it. Its beyond this scope of the post.
I even did many case studies about this without links or even any
SEO and I have come to a conclusion about this.
Rich keyword content is king period, its in Google's interest to show the best relevant results to satisfy their customers.
Linking adds authority to your website for extremely competitive niches and will help you in many ways, but I will stand by this "Content Is King"
I just wanted to share some of my experience for this common question about content and linking.
Ed
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