So Let’s Talk About Link Building… Do Links Still Matter? Or Will They in the Future?

Do links still matter? Yes. Am I doing them right? Probably not

Suddenly, we are back to discussing backlinks, link-related penalties, and all that fun.

Some of the common questions that I see every day:

• Do backlinks still help for organic search rankings?

• Do backlinks increase your LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, AI Mode, etc.) visibility?

• What to do if I am penalized for spammy link building tactics?

The short answers are:

Do backlinks still help for organic search rankings?

YES!

Do backlinks increase your LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, AI Mode, etc.) visibility?

YES!

What to do if I think I was penalized for spammy link building tactics?

If you are not sure, you likely were not… But you may need to improve your link building strategy…

But let’s try to figure this all out in more detail and add some context…

>>>> JOIN us to discuss this LIVE and bring your questions!

Do backlinks still matter?

This question has been floating around for years now, but those who do actual SEO work and track visibility have always known the answer: Yes. Because we see this in practice.

But there’s a very recent confirmation that got a lot of attention.

Someone asked on Reddit if incorrect disavowing links can cause a sitewise penalty… And in the midst of everyone in the thread hating on the Disavow tool* and saying it is outdated, Google’s John Mueller joined in to say that the Disavow tool is still useful.

* Note: The Disavow tool allows website owners to instruct Google to ignore listed backlinks pointing to their websites.

If we try to cut through all the noise that this statement caused, here are some important takeaways:

• This means backlinks matter a lot (otherwise, why would the Disavow tool still exist?)

• This also means that the backlinks don’t just “matter”; they are still important AND often complicated enough for Google not to be able to figure them out algorithmically: there is still a tool that allows website owners to point Google to backlinks they don’t want to count for rankings.

So the answer is a confident yes here.

Will backlinks matter in the future?

Yes, but let’s talk more about this, as most marketing teams and business owners don’t like this answer.

A few decades of SEO spoiled us: We were trained to look at backlinks in terms of numbers: PR (and then DR or DA), as well as how many we got.

These days, it is about true visibility.

If backlinks drive relevant visibility in trustworthy publications, they matter, regardless of your goal: whether it is SEO, GEO, or wherever your goal is.

The thing is, Google, as well as any LLM out there (like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude), is looking for trust signals, and the best trust signals out there are:

• Citability signals (such as backlinks from trusted publications or relevant brand mentions)

• Organic search visibility (which is driven by the above).

For decades, humanity hasn’t come up with better trust signals than citability and mentions.

The thing is, if you are not mentioned anywhere outside of your own website, your business may not be trusted. The more you get cited and mentioned, the more you are trusted, and hence the higher your visibility in both organic search and AI answers.

It is that simple. I am not sure why this causes so much confusion or debate.

What if I Think My Website Lost Rankings Over Spammy Backlinks?

Let’s talk about penalties now because there’s still a lot of confusion here.

This confusion came from old link-related updates, called Penguin. Those were a series of officially announced updates when Google penalized websites algorithmically if a spammy link-building pattern was identified.

In 2016, Google announced that the Penguin update became part of the core algorithm. An important part of that announcement:

Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

This means that:

• Spammy links will not impact your whole site. Low-quality link building tactics can still impact certain pages, but the filters no longer act as penalties. Poor-quality links may be devalued, so your page may be losing rankings because a previously effective link no longer sends any authority signals. (This, unless you got a manual link-related penalty.)

• There may be no updates associated with a change in rankings. These changes may happen at any time, with no warning.

Instead of Thinking “Recovery”, Think “How to Do Things Right Going Forward?”

In other words, unless you got a manual penalty claiming your links are spammy, there’s nothing to recover from. If you are losing ranking, it may be just because you were wasting your money on questionable link-building tactics, and those backlinks just lost their link equity. And it is likely a sign to start investing in something real and long-term instead.

So the recovery route is not about fixing what you may have done in the past. It is about changing your current SEO and link-building tactics to provide higher quality.

If you need help diagnosing your traffic loss, creating a GEO-/SEO-friendly link-building strategy, or improving your visibility, reach out!