Planet13 - 8:14 am on Jul 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

Link building is part of what we have to do, of course, but link building for SEO sake, as in the old term for SEO, is not anywhere as strong as it used to be.

You know, I was looking through the SERPs today for sites that are not in my niche, and I could see why so many people are disraught over panda. Lots of big name / big money retailers taking up the top spots where there had (probably) been smaller sites with optimized text ranking before.

But in each of those instances where there is a mega chain in the top spots, all of them certainly had a boatload of backlinks. Far more than any of the smaller businesses had to their sites.

I am sure there are exceptions, but in my brief tour around the SERPs, they all had backlink profiles that put their competitors to shame.

Also, as martinibuster and wheel have pointed out in other threads, there are lots of spam sites doing really well right now, too.

So I am still not convinced that we should break out the eulogy for link building just yet.