The Future of Link Building Is Not What You Think It Is
Links contribute to key ranking signals, like trust, authority, entity associations, etc.
Last month we published an in-depth “The State of Link Building Survey” and a lot of people reached out to me asking about the future of link building.
So here you go.
Marketing has always been about someone else talking about you. This is not going to change.
Google will one day disappear, just like any other marketing channel, but this will remain true.
And if AI takes over all the marketing channels, it will still remain true because AI has no other data but the data we provide.
So what is the future of link building?
It is still about getting other people talking about your product and business, and in the digital world, links are the only reliable way to verify who or what people are talking about (until we have other means of verification, so it will be called something else).
But that is the distant future…
What about a year from here?
There’s a huge misconception about links as a ranking signal (and Google is to blame, of course).
A link is not simply a direct ranking signal that it used to be.
Links contribute to other fundamental ranking signals, like trust, authority, entity associations, etc.
Here’s just a quick case study. We did a viral marketing campaign for a very new startup that barely had any brand-driven searches. We created a data-driven visual asset, pushed it on Reddit, and reached out to journalists. All of that got quite a few links from news publications to the site.
Within a week after the first couple of outreach-driven links, Google promptly associated the site’s name to the biggest player in the industry:
This is huge.
If you know anything about Google, you know how important entity associations are for Google to start trusting your site. And it is achieved through the right type of links.
When Google recognizes you as a brand, you will likely benefit from other types of external signals (like unlinked brand mentions).
Link building has changed a lot, yes. Links are no longer *just* direct signals. We don’t know which links actually helped improve rankings (because the correlations are chaotic) and links are hard to get (and good links are impossible to guarantee).
But getting other people and brands (especially recognized entities) talking about your (personal) brand, business and product remains and will remain key to any marketing strategy.
If nothing else, the main thing that has changed about link building is that there are no shortcuts (well, if you care about the long-term well-being of your site, otherwise, go experiment and test!)
Let me know what you think. I am always looking for SEO tests, experiments, and theories.