Is one of the most important ranking factors coming to an end: link building?

John Mueller, trend analyst at Google, said at a Brighton SEO conference that Google is getting better at understanding web pages. Therefore, he expects link building to decrease in 'weight' as a Google Pagerank factor in the future. But what exactly is link building?

You can see link building as a reference. Suppose you want to go running and you are looking for good running shoes. Through a blog of a professional athlete, you see that certain shoes in a price range are the best. You immediately accept this as truth. After all, the professional athlete must know... Unlike when you hear it from your neighbor across the street, who has never worn running shoes. It works the same with link building... If website A from the same industry indicates, via a link, that people should be with you for a specific service, Google sees this as a valuable reference. In addition, website A was part of the authority to the site they link to and indicates what the topic is about. As a result, Google understands your page better and knows for which question or search query you should be shown. UpMention does this through the ABC link strategy! More on that later.

However, John Mueller - mentioned above - later indicated that Google will always value backlinks. "We need to be able to find pages on the web in some way, and we can't do that without some reference."

Besides that, a good backlink indicates what a page is about; it also shows that a third party sees it as important content about, for example, a relevant niche.

This announcement is partially unexpected for us. A few months ago, Google indicated that the content and its quality would play an increasingly important role. The better the copy's quality, the better Google will understand the topic. After all, the user comes first.

How do we see link building now?

As mentioned above: link building remains essential, only to a lesser extent. Investing time in it will still be valuable to your site. But which link-building strategy should you apply in the future?

A link profile should be as natural as possible. Yes, acquiring high-authority backlinks contributes to your authority to a greater extent. But Google also sees that it only went partially naturally. Getting the links then… Eventually, this will work out to your detriment. That is why we believe that a link profile should be built naturally. This revolves around domains or pages relevant to you or your customer, regardless of authority. If you sell houses, a link from a mortgage advisor is vital; a link from the automotive industry slightly less.

Often these sites want something in return. We do not recommend a link from your site back to them. Because of that, you indicate to Google that the visitor can find more on the referred page. So how do you give something in return? We explain how we approach this…

Our network has many link partners in various fields and niche markets. When customer A requests a link from link partner B, link partner B receives a link from link partner C. This way, it costs our customer nothing, and link partner B also gets something in return. The ABC link building-strategy !

Obtaining a link naturally does take a lot of time. For example, we spend an hour and twenty minutes (on average) arranging a backlink for our customers- and ourselves. If you want to take a serious approach to link building, you must also make time for this seriously. Fortunately, there are plenty of parties to which you can outsource link building!