Jordon Koene of the Voices of Search podcast told about his predictions for 2020 and all of them were like meah, yeah whatever for me except this one. I agree with this one so much.
The value of backlinks is going down. I believe it has for a long time in my opinion.
I always tell my clients if their competition can buy that same link it’s not really worth anything. The value in backlinks is earning backlinks not buying them. That means the most valuable backlinks aren’t going to cost you anything and are the hardest to get. It means make your content worth linking to so that you’ll just get the links naturally.
I love Help a Reporter as a backlink tool because it’s free and you have to have merit to your comments to be selected. It’s always a risk and you just have to sort of put yourself out there. I feel getting good backlinks is a whole lot like picking where to live. You might visit the bad neighborhoods, but you are going to place yourself in the best you can and surround yourself with other good businesses. Those links carry the most value.
This is why I put the least emphasis on link building and I only start working on it when site is technically great and there are at least 60 indexed pages, usually rankings are moderate already when we start on this task. It’s hard and takes a lot of time to do it properly. There are lots of companies that will cheat this step of the process. It’s actually the easiest steps to cheat as well.