3 Things That Might Overtake Link Building

Updated January 11, 2023

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Future’s Now

SEO is constantly evolving and there are few parts of SEO as important as link building. If you’re building links in the right way they can provide a solid SEO foundation from which you can increase your website traffic.

A good link profile helps to establish your authority online, giving the SEO crawlers enough content to prove confirm your legitimacy, as well as helping out your readers. Inbound links are slightly different, but again if you are building solid relationships and creating quality content you should start to build a high authority domain.

Of all the SEO tactics people have used to increase site ranking, link building may be the one that has changed the most. So how is it going to change in the future?

Investing in Link Building Futures

At the moment there isn’t a way to fake quality backlinks. Sure if you’re a large multinational publishing company that manages multiple well ranked sites, you can kick-start your link profile, but if you’re a regular business owner, you’re starting from the beginning. Google and the other major search engines won’t want to change that in a big way. But things will evolve. So what could be next?

Over the last decade link building has been a constant part of page rank. Initially it was abused with black hat SEO tactics. But link spam began to die off when Google announced their 2012 Penguin update. Stating that links needed to be natural in order to get any SEO juice. Which brings us to where we are now. An era of what has been called “organic link building”.

Mentions

One idea is that links themselves will become obsolete as a ranking factor. Eventually Google’s search algorithm will become advanced enough to recognize a brand’s name, or product name, and ‘link’ that SEO credit back to the original company. So instead of someone having to directly link your website, they will be able to mention you then Google will credit your website. As this ‘mentions’ ranking factor becomes bigger, it would be logical to assume that the role of links would be less important.

Reviews

Another new ranking factor that could help push links to the back of the queue is reviews. Google already looks at Google My Business reviews, but it may well start to take into account reviews and ratings from other third party sites like TripAdvisor, or Yelp. It has even been suggested that as the algorithms improve the search engine will be able to detect a ‘tone’ of voice from the review itself. Making it much more sophisticated than simply counting the number of stars you’ve got on your profile.

Social

And finally, a much predicted ranking factor, social signals. If the search engines begin to count social media mentions, links and other engagement it will change the SEO game further. Currently there is no direct SEO boost from any social media interactions that your company receives, but this is likely to change. Again decreasing the importance of links in your SEO ranking.

Any, or all, of the three factors mentioned above could have a big impact on how important link building is in the coming years. Do you see anything else taking link building’s crown as the Queen of pagerank?