Rankwinz

Link-Building Does Have a Future

Today it is much harder to build links that help improve your online business and drive organic traffic. It has been simple before Google developed methods to treat links with different levels of quality and trust. And the fact that it comes more difficult to build links doesn’t mean link-building is dead.

Links will always be important when it comes to ranking. Google has always been looking for more information, more indicators, more signals to figure out if a certain page is relevant for a user at a given time. They will find them. What can naturally happen is that other signals may be replaced or modified since Google becomes smarter and has a better understanding of web and users.

All this means that in the future the links accepted by Google will be the ones got as a result of quality product and quality marketing.

What we had in the past

Google wasn’t able to understand links. They didn’t get the following things:

·         Was the link paid or not;

·         How much trust to give to a link;

·         Was the link editorially given or not;

·         Was the link high quality or not;

·         Was a link relevant or not.

What we have now

Google understands much more. Hummingbird represented just the beginning of what Google expects to achieve and the reason the same technology that helped the query bellow will also help Google get a better understanding of links.

Google now understands people better. They are learning about us all the time in order to be able to provide more relevant search results. Today they understand more that the keywords we use may not be exactly what we need, nor are they enough to find what we need.

If speaking about link-building it is important to understand that now there are much more signals that could mean that the dial on links is getting turned down a little bit more. 

The future of link-building

To predict the future is not easy and knowing what to do about it is difficult too. But there are several things we all should be doing:

1. Don’t look for scalable link-building methods;

2. Focus on a type of marketing users love;

3. Don’t be ignorant! Pay attention to what is changing.

Links don’t disappear, it is the world that changes and we have to do our best to do what really matters.