The Death Of Links

Certain people have become fond of the opinion that in the future, the importance of a link to your website will have less of an effect on the rankings of your site.

The thinking is that when trying to determine the quality of your site, things like human votes rather than a link from another website will gain prevalence and importance in the ranking algorithms. It was the alumni of this school of thought who cheered “I told you so” when Google introduced the ability to click to “promote” or “remove” on any search listing, thereby “voting” for a particular site over another.

But I wanted to make a point to the contrary…

I don’t think link building is dying.

I don’t think the importance placed on an incoming link is dying and I don’t think it will die. Here’s why:

A link from another website is like a conversation about that website. Someone is talking about your site on their site/blog and so they link to you.

Sure, the link doesn’t indicate what KIND of conversation they’re having about your site, but it’s a start. (besides if they really hate your site, they’ll avoid linking to you right?)

And Google knows this too. They made Google Alerts so you could be notified when someone links to you… when someone is discussing you or your site in Cyberspace.

So a growth in incoming links is like a growth in conversation. It’s word of mouth and if it’s growing, it means that word is spreading (take note about the importance of gradual GROWTH of your incoming links).

Similarly, WHICH sites are talking about you is important, not just how many sites. (or what ELSE those sites are talking about)

Giving a link to another site is (to paraphrase Chris Anderson of The Long Tail) like saying “I value your site so much that I’m willing for some of the attention of my valued readers to be taken away from my site completely in order to be given to yours”

That’s why a link from a quality site is so valuable.

Not only that but think about this.

In any community, there are influencers of opinion and those who are influenced by opinion. And you’re probably one of the latter sometimes, and one of the former at others.

For example, there might be 100 million blogs in the world (I’ve no idea of the real number) but there has to be more people who READ blogs right? More Blog Readers in total?

This is just a theory, but…

If someone finds a site that they like and they promote it in their search wiki, they are a person and they have voted.

But imagine if a person who owns a blog that’s clearly popular and linked to often in that niche… links to that same site.

Which is a bigger indication of that site’s quality?

It could be argued that the big site owner is more trustworthy and is a more reliable guage of quality since he’s known in the community, is already popular and has many followers whereas the guy who clicked “promote” this site, could be anyone…

The idea there being that the people who own blogs and those who are popular and authoritative in any niche vote by linking. Or rather, linking is the most tangible kind of vote from a person like that, that Google can pick up on.

Like I said this is just theory but it’s strong enough in my mind to make me believe that linking isn’t going to die any time soon even though there’s no doubt that other indications of value will become increasingly more integral to the structure of search algorithms.

Happy times.