Backlinks Are the New PageRank Theater

Every SEO pitch deck has the same slide, the one that promises to "build high-quality backlinks to boost your domain authority," and it sounds good because it's measurable, you can put it in a spreadsheet, you can show a graph going up and to the right, and it's almost entirely theater.

The Backlink Industrial Complex

Somewhere around 2005, the SEO industry discovered that links were how Google ranked pages, the famous PageRank algorithm, and so they built an entire economy around manufacturing links through guest posts, link exchanges, PBNs, HARO pitches, niche edits, and "digital PR," all of which is the same thing when you strip away the jargon: artificially creating signals that are supposed to represent organic endorsement but actually represent nothing more than someone paying for placement (and when Google catches you, you get seven years of penalty purgatory).

And here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody selling link building wants to admit: Google figured this out years ago.

Google Doesn't Need Your Links Anymore

Google has user behavior data from Chrome, Android, and every site running Google Analytics, which means they know what people actually click on, they know what satisfies search intent, they know when someone bounces back to the SERP in frustration, and they have machine learning models that understand content quality without counting links, models that can identify topical authority from the content itself rather than from who's pointing at it.

Links are legacy infrastructure, a ranking signal from an era when Google couldn't actually read and understand content and had to rely on external signals to guess what was good, and that era ended around 2015.

Why the Industry Can't Let Go

Link building is the perfect agency service because it's measurable (we got you 47 links this month, look at this spreadsheet!), it's repeatable (same playbook, every client, every month, no creativity required), it's easy to sell (more links equals better rankings, a simple story anyone can understand), and it justifies retainers (building links takes ongoing work, ka-ching).

The industry has a financial incentive to keep the backlink myth alive, which is why they do, and why every SEO conference features panels about link building strategies as if we're still living in 2008.

What Actually Works

Here's the unsexy truth, the one that doesn't fit on a slide or justify a $10k monthly retainer: make something worth linking to.

Original research, useful tools, genuinely helpful content, controversial opinions that people want to reference, actual insights that come from doing the work rather than summarizing what other people have already written, and when you create something valuable, links happen naturally, not because you begged for them through 500 outreach emails but because people genuinely want to share them.

That's the signal Google is trying to measure, and they're getting better at finding it without the proxy of links, which means the best link building strategy is building something worth linking to, and the second best strategy is not worrying about links at all.

Stop paying for PageRank theater and start creating actual value.