Why Links Remain important to SEO Success

With all the "link building is dead!" and "link building isn't dying or dead!" posts out there, joined with the fright that many people seem to have where link building is concerned, it's natural to wonder about who's right. We all have our skewed perspectives too, along with it would be silly to try and pretend that, as a person who specializes in link building, I'd ever say that links are an dying out species.

I think social is here to stay and its value will only grow. I think that it's not possible to imagine the day when technical SEO professionals won't be needed to help make sure that site architecture is best and to instruct us on how to handle all the new code issues that happen as everyone gets online. I think that great writers will find that their skills are even more in demand than ever.

I think that the production is swarming with misinformation about links and that many sites who can't afford to engage in risky techniques still do so simply because they don't have to get concerned or lift a finger.
However, link building isn't dead or dying. It's changing, yes, and it's getting much harder, but it's still alive and kicking and here's why.
 

Why Links Matter

The web was built on links. Links drive traffic and they increase rankings. They are how we tell a story. They are how we point people to things we want them to see and how we navigate through the endlessness of the Internet.
No matter what anyone says, without high-quality links, you can't perform at an optimal level physically (at least not for long) and you can't weather algorithmic updates that crush sites with weaker profiles.

So what is a high-quality link? When we say that links matter, we don't always differentiate between subpar, average, and high quality links and that's an important difference.
I can give you more examples of bad links than I can of remarkable links, sadly, because bad links are easy to get. High-quality links aren't.

Secondly, look at these three facts:

•    Google's Page Rank is based on links. If the value of links is going to lessen, they're going to have to reword the algorithm. If they wanted to do that they'd have done it already.

•    Spiders use links to crawl the web just like humans use them to navigate.

•    Links are a accepted way we tell someone about great. When you're writing and want to reveal an example, isn't it more natural to give the example site a link than to allude to the URL and say "hey you, go see if you can figure out what this URL that I position actually is and look it up yourself!"?

The importance of value comes into play with Google's Page Rank and you know what? It always has. Many people have just incorrectly assumed that it was strictly a quantity game where the site with the most links rose to the top, but that is really oversimplifying the way it all works.

A high-quality link is so high in quality somewhat because of the quality of the sites linking to it. When that high-quality link is keen at your site, you receive more value than you do if you were linked to from a page that had lower authority from lower-quality links pointing to it.
 

*Directly From Google's Mouth
 

In the updated webmaster answers on rankings, Google now says this:
In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and divide.

That "share" part can happen in many ways but the language isn't exclusive to links any longer. Notice the bit about "high-quality" too, as it used to pertain to links. Sharing is still done via links even though it's also done on community sites and offline methods, but the idea isn't really different; the language is what's misused.

Let's look at another Google quote:

Google has invented many innovations in search to improve the answers you find. The first and most well-known is PageRank, named for Larry Page (Google's co-founder and CEO). Page Rank works by including the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying statement is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

There's that declare of "quality" again alongside the "important" language. This is on a page about how Google search works, on the Google.com domain, so it's unlikely that it is false. If links from high-quality sites stop mattering, PageRank will stop mattering, and is that likely?

Other things may be more important (like the negative signals sent out from having a poor link profile) and the grouping of many factors can matter more than one single one, but will we see a day when links aren't a factor for SEO? Nope.
 

Too Much Fuss?
 

Think about paid links. Even after the no follow attribute was new and Google cracked down on both the buyers and sellers of links via Webmaster Tools warnings and penalties, people still want to buy and sell links.

Would Google keep trying to crack down on how we manipulate links if there was an easier way and if links weren't really that significant? Would they invest that kind of energy and time if anything else could be done? Would they have formed the disavow tool if they could properly determine that a link shouldn't be counted?
 

Links Post-Penguin
 
Here's something I bet they didn't expect to occur after Penguin 2.0 though:

Some sites that had before linked out for free now asked for payment to keep the links up or followed because they theorized that if people were getting penalized or warned for bad free links, they may as well make some money off what they were doing because who knows what Google would think about those links down the road?

If Google decides that a site is guilty of linking out in an abnormal manner, why not go ahead and make a few bucks before it gets strike? I'm not saying these were great sites to begin with of course, because in the cases I've looked at, they were not, but if authority sites start to fear connecting out, what's to stop them from wanting to make money off the few links that they do give out?

If you think that webmasters on any site put up a link and that's the end of it, you're living in a dream world. Links get changed, removed, nofollowed, and become out of order.

Dishonest people contact a webmaster and ask for links to be taken down for competitors' sites and these webmasters don't have the time or wish to verify that these are legitimate requests, so you know that great link you have? You might have just lost it or it might now point to your competitor.

That's the problem. There are many of awful and dangerous free links out there, and there are loads of authority links that have been purchased. There are loads of people who can control this system to their benefit and cause you harm in the process. It is a mess, but it's one that is impossible to clean up.
 

Summary
 

We do place a high value of significance on recommendations whether it's your father telling you the best place to buy a used car or Columbia University linking to a local medical center that they recommend pre-med students check out for an internship. That's the way the world works, not just the Internet.

As we become busy with more voices telling us what we should do and where we should do it, the power voices will stand out even more. Having a advice from those authorities will only get more important.

So links aren't dying. We just need to focus on building better ones.