I spend very little time looking at the major public blog posts out there because there’s so little to learn from them. Basically, 99.9% of the time they are a huge waste of time.
Here’s an interesting article on the future of link building. So many silly ideas in there. I’m glad he’s challenging the amateurish idea of “link building is evil.”
But, I really want to focus on his 6 points about the future of link building.
- “Links will still be a significant part of the algorithm” — True. Google has stated that they’ve tested algorithms without links and the results are terrible.
- “The Algorithm Will Become Increasingly Attuned to Non-Legitimate Forms of Building Links” — True and False and not important. Basically, Google will get better at sniffing out certain things. However, they can’t solve everything and sometimes they often have to let up on another part of the algorithm to enforce something new — putting them in the game of whack-a-mole.
- “The Algorithm Will Shift Towards Stronger Alternate Signals” — Mostly false. Google’s will always be trying to find new signals to check. Furthermore, new signals will come up that don’t even exist today. However, Links are a fundamental part of Google’s algorithm and that won’t change any time soon.
- “The Algorithm Will Prefer to See Co-Citation, Co-Occurrence, and General Brand Authority” — Unsure whether this will be true, but I’m not terribly concerned if it turns out to be true.
- “An Evolution of User Search Practices” — True
- “An Increase in Social Search” — Maybe. Unsure about how social media will move forward.
“I advise SEOs and marketers to spend the bulk of their resources on high quality content marketing for the most effective and enduring method of search optimization.”
The above statement is very bad advice. His recipe for SEO is 100x more expensive and much less likely to work. And if it does work, it takes a lot longer. From a business standpoint, only big companies with big budgets can do this reliably.
Yes, creating good content helps with SEO, but doing it all by itself is not SEO. It is content marketing.
This is not surprising coming from Neil Patel who makes a bunch of money talking about content marketing.
