Does Link Building Matters To Seo In 2018?

With the change in time, the technology and related concepts are changing rapidly. A very frequent question that comes into the mind of several people is, with the change in technology, is link building is getting outdated?

In the year 2018, will link building create an advantageous position for SEO?

Let us dig deep into this discussion to find out a possible answer within this post.

Link Does Not Carry The Same Prominence As It Used To:

Many SEO professionals from Chicago SEO company over the years has found certain observations about the state of link in 2018, with usage of links and citation to various research and patents. 

Within this discussion they found that links are affect the rankings of a website in three ways. These are:

1. Validating links

Validating links has the nature to let your website look good in the eyes of crawler and get it nicely crawled as well. In simpler words, these type of links tend to validate the site to be reliable for people and also for search bots.

According to penguin algorithms research, Google create two link graphs. One of the is about including spammy links and another one is excluding pages which are spammy. Validating links are meant to be included definitely.

Websites should work hard to earn links from right sites to maintain their rankings on SERPs. This is called as reduced link graph as it does not have a complete map of every page present on internet. The map exclude all the spammy sites and are reduced to the one which matters the most.

The effect of link is contradictory as there are some which helps ranking and there are some which don’t allow better ranking which can make you get excluded from reduced link graph which is highly important.

2. Links which helps a site to rank

Considering the reduced link graph concept, where the web is considered according to having relevant links from authority pages. Thus, this becomes clear that some will help in ranking while some links like validating links will help the site to get crawled easily and get included for ranking while some simply are of no use.

Dallas SEO company professionals suggest that the concept of site authority states that some sites provide authority and links from these sites are highly important to help a site rank higher. However, Google denies about the existence having a domain authority metrics. Thus, if we go about Google’s understanding the idea about sites having many links do not create any significance in ranking a website. Some popular websites like Huffington post and many others have used no-follow on their outbound links in 2017 and there is no impact seen in their SEO rankings. No effect was seen as the links earned had no effect on the ranking of the site.

3. Links cannot judge about what should rank better

For past years, Google has given a very strong influence on users intent. The user intent can be understood as the content which people are typing on search engine about the particular query and their expectations.

It is very important to understand here that Google believes in personalizing the search results based users search result. For example, if users are searching for Jaguar, then most users expect to have Jaguar the automobile brand which Google ranks first. It may happen that sites with Jaguar as animal or Jaguar as a college sports team has maximum number of links, however, as the automobile Jaguar suits with the user intent, therefore, it will be shown with higher ranking on search results. This way user intent breaks the power of link signal with its search relevancy.

Therefore, Links can no longer determine who rules at the top of SERPs. Sometimes getting links does not help you rank well if your content does not satisfy the need of the users.

Link Building Should Be Reconsidered

It is high time to think link building process in a different light. You should consider this timeline of link building:

• Ranking was about obtaining the most number of links

• Ranking become about obtaining maximum links with the most keyword relevant anchor text.

• Ranking became the way of getting most number of links from relevant pages which does not hold spammy outbound link pattern.

• Anchor text matters less

• Content which is getting linked and the content where the link is pointed, both matters the most.

The Scenario Of Link Building In 2018

Why link building value decreased?

The past strategies for link building was based on certain tactics which initially was accepted to Google for helping the site rank well. However, problem arises when SEO scaled  them.

For example, earlier submitting websites to some of the directories was considered appropriate. Later SEOs started building directories and helping to increase the pagerank score by buying links.

Another very relevant example is trading links. Before the usage of links, this way was used to gain visibility online. After that SEO scaled the process by sending massive amount of emails for trading links. This process was later recognized and stopped by Google by identifying what is natural link and which can be considered under penalty.Similar thing happened with Guest posting as well.

Does the links existence is questionable?

 According to experts, links are important today but not that much as it was in previous times. Therefore, giving focus anchor text and worrying about getting links, it is important to think about the users. Find where your targeted users are and then create strategy to earn citation or links from those pages.

Websites which can buy your product or service is a good option for your site getting recommendation.

There are many people who believe websites which have reciprocal links,paid links and many such are doing good on Google search results because of their link building tactics. However, we suggest that it is important to look at bigger picture. It should not be overlooked that those link building strategies is not a sole reason for the increasing in site ranking, there may be some good practices which have followed by site despite using spammy link practice.

Conclusion

It should be never be forgotten that Google discounts links which are spammy rather penalizing. This way getting bad or spammy links would not help as compared to getting ranked by other positive aspects of the site. This is the prime reason we hold the opinion that links matter in all the way differently.

Links do matter but not as important as it was before.