So Let's Talk about Links

So links are no longer as important... The sky is falling! (Yet again!)

Apparently, Google’s Gary Illyes said that links were no longer among the top three ranking factors. And apparently, they haven’t been a top ranking factor for a while (we just didn’t notice).

Back in 2016 they said links were in top-3 of ranking factors, along with content and… RankBrain (!?)

Should I say more?

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When Googlers cannot decide what are signals and what are algorithms...

Now before I go back to doing actual work… let me challenge you. I mean, seriously, if you’d like to give it a try, I’ll be willing to help with the set-up, research or however else I can help.

So here you go:

• Start a new site on any topic you’d like

• Find keywords that seem doable (low competition)

• Write content… write well, like you want that content to really help someone.

• Add to Search Console (sitemaps, blah blah blah)

• Sit and wait for the rankings and traffic to come

(I had done all of that and sat and waited for 8 months)

When you are done waiting, go ahead and build some links to that content. Don’t change anything on the site. Let’s assume, your content is awesome (& helpful) enough as it is... Wait for some time (a month or two, depending on how good those links are).

Here is your magic: Your rankings miraculously have started showing up!

Miracles happen!

In my case, I gave up and started getting links in late spring. Yes, the rankings came shortly after.

But wait, there’s more: Rankings (and search clicks) had started showing up exactly to the pages I happened to get links to (before they started spreading to other pages).

Coincidence? I think not!

And I won’t even talk about all those clients (and their competitors) who saw an increase in rankings after a solid link building campaign.

Now, don’t come to me saying “We have a site and we never built links to it and IT RANKS“

For real?

I won’t even try to count how many times I’ve heard that. And then I see that domain. It is either not ranking or it has been built links to…

That is not to say that the state of link building is the same as it was - say - 10 years ago. It has changed a lot! You can no longer say which links have actually moved the needle and which were a waste of your time. It has become much more about quality and much less about quantity.

And yes, other “top” factors have gained in power. From top of my mind, these are

1. Content (I really wanted to say “Content helpfulness“ but ugh it sounds so cliche at this point)

2. Topical authority

3. Context (semantics, etc.)

4. Whichever trust signals they are using….

And yes, Google’s algorithm has been using machine learning to make a better sense of all those signals for a while now (ummm RankBrain which is not actually a ranking factor or however they call it now).

The emergence and growth of other signals doesn’t mean that links have become less of a signal.

Yes, the SEO game has got much more complicated. But links are still key to rankings, whichever number they hold on that scale of factors (if those are even factors).

Again, if you don’t trust me, take my challenge. Prove me wrong!

With that, let’s get to my digest now.

Tools to try this week:

• SeoStack is a Google Chrome extension which scrapes Search Automplete results from Google, DuckDuckGo, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, eBay, and Pinterest. You can choose the type of keywords you want scraped (every letter of the alphabet, questions, numbers and/or prepositions). You can export the whole list of keywords as a spreadsheet. Pretty cool!

• GA4 (any fans of it here? I don’t like it either) but we must work with what we have! While we are discussing ranking factors, you have to keep an eye on your traffic through all those updates and hysteria. So here you go: GA4 Analytics Insights allows you to set up email traffic alerts based on a variety of criteria, including advertising revenue changes, conversion, or suspicious traffic fluctuations. For SEO purposes, I suggest creating an alert that would trigger based on traffic decreases. You can choose what traffic changes you’d like to be alerted of. It could be a certain percentage of decrease in traffic, a certain change in traffic, or just an anomaly (in the latter case you let Google Analytics decide what they think looks like a weird fluctuation you need to be aware of). So go ahead and set up yours! You can create up to 50 custom insights per property, so set up a few of them to be able to choose which ones alert you of the essential changes.

  

  Create email alerts in G4

Must-reads:

• In-SERP signals of a stronger brand (by yours truly, but I thought it was so timely!)

• Sunsetting Old Forum Content: Ideas for Managing Crawling & Indexing: Many sites with a good amount of UGC are facing this problem, so keep this thorough article handy.

• This one is not a must-read in any shape or form. I am including it here for you to understand everything that is wrong with the SEO coverage these days: SEO Is Dead. Long Live AO. AO??? Optimizing for Artificial Intelligence??? Oh and yes, this is completely new - we have not at all been experiencing this for about 5 years: “Instead of simply showing results at the top of the page, Google A.I. search tries to answer your query, give you valuable context, allow you to ask follow-up questions, and otherwise provide useful results.

Don’t talk shit, if you don’t know shit

The problem of SEO, as an industry, is that many people who have never done SEO can still come up with flashy headlines.

Ok, I’ll stop ranting right now. Man, I missed ranting. I promise my regular digests are much more actionable, but I enjoyed writing it!

Please share your thoughts!