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It might sound strange that I still use the term link building!

After all those years and despite new terms like “earning links” etc.

It sounds funny in a way because I am the guy who has explained many years ago that you don’t need link building anymore. In fact

according to my own SEO 2 theory you rather attract links instead of link building.

Does SEO 2 work as desired then? Yes. It works well.

It’s rather that the SEO 1.0 era of manual link building is over.

Does link building still work for SEO on the current Web?

In short: yes! Yes, links still work!

Link building is just not “manual” anymore.

The history of modern link building

Let me start with the bigger picture.

What happened to the concept of SEO 2 as a whole? Is it still valid? It is. How?

Most SEO 2 techniques I have tried to spread since 2007 are common sense by now.

They are just called SEO nowadays. The meaning of SEO has changed, not the acronym itself.

At the same time link building has evolved and encompasses link magnets and attracting links as well if you ask me.

It’s the old term but it has a new meaning by now.

Just consider the term “white paper”. Is it a paper at all these days? Yet people understand what it is.

Likewise link building has a new definition nowadays.

It may not be manual link building anymore. It may not even contain widely used old school techniques like

• directory submission
• article marketing
• press releases

Most of these techniques are obsolete by now. Others have changed as well.

Some techniques are obsolete, others are evergreen

There are still directories worth being included in.

I still have one right here on seo2.blog! Article marketing has been killed off in 2011 with the Panda update though and guest posting has replaced it ever since.

Even guest blogging is considered spammy as of now though by Google.

Press releases still get used for spreading the word.

Yet their SEO value is very low. They’re just good enough for getting a healthy link profile of low level links.

Influencer outreach and blogger relations have replaced traditional link building techniques by now.

Nonetheless quite often I have used the term link building in the old school way.

I mean the tedious, manual practice of contacting and bargaining with website owners, trying to find link partners etc.

Even this part of link building still exists.

There are still many low level SEO practitioners who can’t get real links.

They still try to build them one by one themselves!

Some of them use shady ways.

They sneak in and add links in UGC parts of websites or spam Reddit.

Thus the meaning of particular link building depends on context.

Luckily we don’t have to rely solely on tedious “manual” short term tactics anymore.

Yet the smaller and more conservative the niche or country you optimize for the less influencers and bloggers are there to get links from.

The smaller the niche the more difficult is it to attract links naturally or to improve the process of attracting links.

Relationships with people make or break links

At the end of day proper link building is mainly about

• managing of contacts and relationships
• overseeing the technical integrity of links
• planning campaigns of blogger outreach

This way you make them link to you and the links work.

Link building is the name of the game even though it might be an altogether different link building than originally.

It’s the same with SEO. It might be called search everywhere optimization and also cover social media and content creation.

It’s basically SEO 2 as I imagined it.

Yet the people prefer to use the term they are accustomed to.

This phenomenon is not just limited to search marketing. Just consider cars. We still measure by “horse power” there even though we aren’t cowboys either are we?

Yes. Link building still does exist as a SEO practice. It’s not the manual one of many years ago.

Even link bait has changed now that high profile link magnets outperform cheap tricks.

Plus viral content is the holy grail and everybody attempts “to go viral” on social media as well.

* Creative Commons image by Ryan Mitchell

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