Comments on: What happens when links don’t matter anymore? [SEO Theory]

By: Blake Waddill

Blake Waddill — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:16:03 +0000

I can’t image how social will ever be more valuable than links from high authority/trust sites. Social is far more easier to abuse than link building.

How hard is it to create dozens of FREE accounts and start autofollowing people and retweeting your work. Weeding out the real account from the bogus accounts is a challenge that will become increasingly difficult. I can think of several Twitter accounts with Klout over 40 that are almost 100% autopilot. While Klout is like PR and can be manipulated, it is still an indicator of authority that search engines will have to evaluate.

To make a long story short, social media CAN and WILL be manipulated and abused just like link building. Links will always remain the most useful signal.

By: Gert

Gert — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 18:00:34 +0000

Interesting post … I believe the number and quality of links will stay one of the main metrics for the search engines for a longer time …. even in times of twitter, facebook or google+, great content is still linked to – maybe now a quality link is worth even more, as somebody has taken the time to describe a service and set a link to it.

By: Tom Shivers

Tom Shivers — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:11:52 +0000

Social media is mainly a crowd building/influence building tool that can bring in real links when it gets to the right bloggers. The problem is not all industries or people use social media (gasp), so search engines will probably never “unplug” from the link graph.

By: Maciej

Maciej — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:33:20 +0000

I agree I don’t think link will ever stop being the benchmark but I can see significant wight being removed from certain types of links. This industry is do dynamic that nobody really knows what is around the corner. Things will always change to clean up the bad apples.

By: Ron

Ron — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:53:51 +0000

I don’t think links will be taken out of the equation completely.
Maybe social media sites will be the new google, and google will be a thing of the past (not likely, but who knows)

Google used to be informal, easy to search for information.
Now it is an advertisers wet dream.

I think people will to go where information/content is really really good and fresh, and less advertising. Not everyone wants to whip out there wallets every time they have a question
Just my thoughts
-Ron