Backlinks are dead, or are they?

Links are a very important ranking signal for Google. Links are so important that Google puts a lot of effort into detecting bad backlinks. If you hear someone saying “link building does not work anymore”, the person actually says “link spamming does not work anymore.”

The automatic links that might have helped your website in the past will get your website penalized today. Automatically creating backlinks in bulk does not work anymore. Faking social network profiles to get backlinks does not work anymore. Spamming forums and article websites with fake or low quality content to get backlinks does not work anymore. Automated link networks do not work anymore.

To make things clear: spamming does not work anymore!

However, this has nothing to do with real backlinks. Real backlinks from good sites are the best thing that can happen to your rankings.

Google’s ranking concept is “things, not strings”. That means that the context of a link is important. The links that point to your website should come from pages that are related to the topic of your own website. Google has been saying this for years but now they are serious about it.

If all of the links that point to your website contain exactly the same keyword, you can be sure that this will trigger an ‘unnatural links’ filter.

If the links to your website contain keywords that are related to the topic of your website, Google will find your website relevant for that topic.

Some people still think that they can trick Google’s algorithm with the ‘brand new secret method that will get your site on Google’s first result page with just a few mouse clicks.’ These spam tools do not work anymore and it is very likely that your website will be penalized if you fake links and other things.

Links that require human intervention are the links that Google considers in the ranking algorithm. Quality is much more important than quantity.

A handful of high quality links are much better than hundreds of automatically created backlinks.