Are Links Dying?

With the recent updates on algorithm where in many were hit by Panda and Penguin, there are lot of speculations that it is better to shift the focus on social signals to get visibility on the web especially on Google rankings and it seems that link building is dying. What do you think? Is it better to make the website alive just by emphasizing your social signals? Or is it really true that social signals replaced links in SEO signal?

To clear those assumptions searchmarketingexpo recently uploaded Youtube video about June 5th SMX Advanced 2012 in Seattle, WA wherein Google’s Distinguished engineer :Matt Cutts was asked by Search Engine Land’s Editor-in Chief: Danny Sullivan if social signals replaced the links as the primary SEO signal for Google ranking algorithm. Even though we can see that social media is on the rise but to end those speculations Matt Cutts said that it’s too early to conclude that links are just history. Those are not still dead.

And here’s his explanation where in just like looking at the library of congress they’ve said that there are 151.4 million items having an estimate of 34 million books and if converted to pure text like OCR it roughly 10 terabytes and the web capture team at library of congress said that it’s 235 terabytes for the largest library in the world. And Matt also added that in every minute Youtube receive 72 hours of videos being uploaded. Therefore, the web is the largest source of data you have ever seen before. Additionally, he said that people think that links are dying since there it’s impossible to get links that are not nofollow. And he said that when you check the percentage of nofollow it only a single digit or very small percentage and this show that links still play an important role in SEO since the web is wide and every minute new data are being generated. Although he sees that in 10 years or in the future, a lot will opt to be more social and it will be more powerful but still he again says that it’s too early to write for the “epitaph” for links.

In the end it only goes back why Google updated its algorithm and that is to provide quality results, so it is essential and a kind of responsibility to provide quality linkbuilding. Through emphasizing the quality in building backlinks you will notice that it can be more effective than shifting your focus on social media nowadays since the social media industry has more tests to try out. And it is not ready yet to replace links wherein according to Matt Cutts when he asked if you have to be in the G+ in order to rank well on Google, definitely his straightforward answer is a NO, it is still an early period to conclude the value of its data. Since according to big G social signals are currently used to present personalized results like in the searchplusworld or in the Google plus and it’s not about prediction of absolute rankings.