Is Backlinking Dead?
I believe that in the not too distant future, google will put less and less emphasis on backlinks in determining the ranking of your website, and focus almost exclusively on the quality and content of your website in determining its rankings.
Why? Because the initial purpose of ranking by backlinks was to recognise that good sites would tend to provide links to other good sites. And also that it was the best indication that google had at the time.
The backlinking method has been totally bastardised by a deluge of dodgy backlinking schemes, methods, and tactics. For the last few years, people have been rewarded for building huge networks of backlinks instead of for creating good content.
Wake up and smell the coffee guys.
Google is getting better and better at rating the quality of a site based on the content of that site. It doesn’t NEED backlinks to tell it that a site has good content any more. Just read up on Google and their use of Latent Semantic Indexing
And I think that pretty soon, the quality of your content will be the primary ranking factor. And your gabillion backlinks from all sorts of dodgy article directories and link farm sites won’t be worth much at all.
So if you think that backlinks are all that is necessary to get good search engine results, then I wish you all the best for the future.
regards,
Eric G.
Hi Eric,
Do you still believe backlinking is dead? I spoke to a top SEO company in UK today to get a quote for seo work and they were promoting backlinks as the only way to get top rank in google.
I believe that backlinking will have less significance in future. At present, it is still an important part of SEO ranking.
but I wouldn’t say that it is “the only way” to get top rank in Google.
A lot depends on the amount of competition for the term, on the prominence of the site on which the content appears, and on the quality of the backlinks.
Backlinks aren’t everything.
See the story of how retailer JC Penney earned a Gogle slap for the dodgy backlinks going to their site.
http://blog.ineedhits.com/search-news/jc-penney-caught-gaming-google-search-results-17579144.html
I think Backlinking will remain an integral part of SEO for a long time, what is changing is HOW you backlink. You cannot just spam backlinks anymore, quality is a large part of the equation.
The JC Penny story shows that Google CAN be gamed with large amounts of unrelated backlinks, they got caught because they were hitting the top of teh rankings for unrelated terms, in otherwords – their SEO firm was stupid.
Back linking is dying and it should. The fact that you can buy linking services strips its value and relevance. Most high ranking pages were garbage piled high with useless words and confusing web designs.
High quality well researched content created with the reader in mind will rule the search engines. I publish articles online weekly without any back linking voodoo. I receive quick indexing and ranking because of the quality, not tricks.