Is link building dead?
It’s a question I see floated around more and more these days.
If you’re somewhat aware of the principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you probably know that more links usually means higher ranking, and higher ranking means more clicks, and more clicks means better returns on your digital investment.
In other words: if we have an online business or presence, whatever can get us to rank higher and be more successful is something we should invest in, while whatever doesn’t, well, now’s as good a time for goodbyes as any.
If only everything were that simple…
Are backlinks on the way out? Do they even still matter?
To dissect this, let’s start with a story.
In much of the “good old days” of the internet and SEO, backlinks – that is, links that other sites send to your own – were arguably the most important factor for getting your business noticed online.
Because of the way early search engines worked, by crawling available links on the web and seeing where they went, Google and others would prioritize pages that had a lot of links going to them.
They basically understood this as a sign that “hey! this page is important, look how many people point to it!”
In many cases, this worked well. Highly trusted and much cited pages were easily found while more obscure ones were less likely to appear at the top of the search results.
Naturally, people found a way of gaming the system, by pointing a ridiculous amount of links to their own content, from as many sites as they could, for some artificial gains.
But fortunately for everyone else, things evolved, and eventually Google and other search engines would include hundreds of different signals that impacted how a page or site ranked.
So, backlinks are dead, right?
The short answer is no – but at the same time, also, kind of, maybe… it’s complicated.
Recently, Google has come out and stated that backlinks aren’t as important for ranking sites as they were ten years ago.
No surprise there. Especially since Google has been cautioning link builders for years that backlinks are becoming less and less important.
In fact, this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve seen articles like this.
If anything, what I think this latest update means is that Google doesn’t want us to focus the majority of our SEO efforts going after links in the belief that they will trump everything else.
The main push for SEO, which I’ve been preaching for a while, should be in the value of the content we provide for your audience.
If we’re running a website, we should be creating relevant and engaging content for our audience – and this goes beyond just listing our store hours or services offered.
Google (and people, too) love fresh and relevant content. If you’re running a business, like say a restaurant, get some blogs in there discussing ingredients, life behind the counter, kitchen tips, or sneak peaks at your new menu items.
Alternatively, if you run a boutique hotel, blog about things to do in your local area, businesses to visit, places to eat, and settle the debate on thread counts in fabric once and for all.
Creating relevant and regular content helps ensure your site gets indexed by Google and that people who want your services will find something they actually want to read there.
In other words, more quality content usually leads to more quality clicks.
The big question, then, is if you spend more time building links than content, you will also get clicks, will you be getting more than by just creating content?
Ultimately, I don’t think, and I haven’t thought so for a long while.
Backlink building takes a lot of time, effort, and failure. It’s not something just anyone can pick up and do effectively. At some agencies, there are full time staff dedicated to this task alone!
And so, for the rest of us, wouldn’t all that energy be better spent just creating more good content?
Of course, for sites where producing content regularly isn’t as viable an option (like some one-product landing pages), off-site link building might still be the best bet – at least until Google changes it mind.
As such, I suspect that in most normal cases, a blog or other section of a website posting good content on a regular basis will drive a ton of traffic and keep gathering steam as you go.
I’ve seen this myself on sites I’ve worked with or launched myself without any backlinking building efforts at all.
Let’s not forget that great content organically generates backlinks anyways – as more and more people link to your awesome stuff.
In other words, if you build it, they will come.
Is all link building equal? What role does referral traffic play?
I feel that among marketers and agencies, some folks are still lagging behind the ways that search engines have changed these past few years.
I keep seeing a lot of SEOs om the web insist on focusing on domain authority and other old-school, technical things like that as being the most important factor of a backlink.
In other words, they spend all their time comparing obscure metrics that few people know about, weighing one link possibility against the next.
Again, if we go back to the early days of the web, this was more or less how things were. A page got rank based on the links going to it, and the whole domain also had an authority score largely based on this too.
However, a lot of the time, what gets lost in the present discussion, is A) are these links coming from relevant sites and B) will anyone actually click on that link and send us quality referral traffic?
When people build backlinks, they do spend time focusing on A, but B gets lost in the shuffle a lot.
If you have a good link to your site from a relevant third-party source, you can in fact get a lot of good traffic and interested people in your audience on your site. Often times, it’s the first way they even discover your products or your business, too.
So, in my opinion, if you are stressed about link building, consider these items:
- Weigh the time spent on link building versus creating content. Prioritize creating content over backlinks.
- When you do go about setting up links to your content, try to place them where people will actually click and read. Social sites like Facebook, Reddit, and other niche spots are great because you can reach your audience and not just random internet goers.
- Don’t worry about it. Even if SEO isn’t your strong suit, there are plenty of marketers who excel here. Or worse case, just focus on Paid Advertising to drive lots of quality traffic quickly to your business.
Are you looking into bolstering the search engine optimization for your business through backlinks, content, or other strategies? Or are you simply looking for more immediate results from your marketing budget?
At Acorn, we’ve got over 20+ years of digital marketing experience working with businesses just like yours. We specialize in data-driven strategies to bolster your ROI using social media, paid ads, SEO, and content creation.
Drop us a message using our contact form. You won’t regret it.
