Link Building: How Important Will It Be For Your Future Online Visibility?
I cannot believe we are still forced to state the obvious: Links are here to stay!
A lot has been said about the importance of backlinks for organic search visibility recently. Here’s what you need to know.
Our SEO industry has one distinct problem: People who lack practical experience in optimizing websites and seeing results from various actions seem to have a lot of venues to express their opinions on what should work and how SEO should be done.
If you have been in our industry for a while, if you actively work on websites and generate organic search traffic, recognizing these people is very easy. They say a lot of smart words, and quote Googlers and decade-old patents, but they can never share any slightest piece of practical SEO advice.
When you confront them with examples, studies, and case studies, they say something like, “It’s just a correlation. You don’t see a big picture.”
And yet…
So far, the impact of backlinks on rankings is obvious to whoever is actively optimizing sites and tracking their performance
Now, going back to link building and the future of it, so far there has been no indication or practical proof showing that backlinks have lost their power as ranking signals.
Yes, there are other signals in play now, many more than about 10 years ago. There are many more layers to deal with, including layers that we have no control over, like clicks and machine learning. But external links remain the only thing that is able to actually move the needle when it comes to higher rankings.
Majestic published an expert roundup to collect SEO professionals’ opinions on the value of backlinks (I was one of those professionals expressing my humble opinion), and the general consensus was, links are not going anywhere.
Jim Boykin regularly publishes link-related studies. In his most recent research, he was determined to find sites ranking for commercial queries without backlinks pointing to them.
The result?
Less than 1% of sites in the top 10 had fewer than 100 unique domain backlinks.
Not 0 backlinks. Fewer than 100.
Links are the foundation of the web, not just Google’s algorithm
There is no other reliable way so far for people to navigate from site to site.
That’s how AI models are discovering sites and brands.
That’s how search engines and language models (LLMs) create associations between brands and concepts, and understand relevancy and intent.
Yes, it takes good link acquisition strategies to generate links that can positively impact your online brand visibility on all those levels. And this is neither easy nor cheap.
That’s why so many agencies shy away from link-building tactics these days and broadcast one loud lie: That backlinks don’t matter anymore.
Good links need work.
It takes diversifying your actions and investing in trying new things.
It takes freshness, so it requires continuous work.
It is not easy to measure (Google is very picky when selecting links that do impact rankings).
But more importantly, there’s no alternative to links
Engagement and click-through data are extremely limited. Unless a site is well-surfaced in search, there’s no click data to analyze.
From Google’s public and leaked documentation, it is obvious that links are rooted in many layers of the algorithm:
Are they coming from authoritative sources?
Are they clicked?
Are they fresh?
All these metrics are then transformed to validate other signals:
Is this site an entity/brand?
Can it be trusted?
Does it have an authority?
Is it up-to-date or stale?
We can build great content all we want but without external validation (links!) Google has no other means of knowing it can be trusted.
Now, if you think I am biased... My agency is not link-building focused though. We provide an array of services that help businesses on many levels (content, audits, brand building, social media, Reddit marketing, reputation management… you name it). Link building is the most expensive and hard service we provide. But we provide it because we want to deliver real results to our clients, and that’s the only way.
I’ve been an SEO for ~20 years and in that time I have never been a professional link builder. I was an editor, community manager, SEO reporter, team leader, founder, etc. But not a link builder. Link building has always been a necessity rather than a choice of mine because without links, there are no results.