[tyingq]

I feel like they are dismissing the value of backlinks too much. Google is better now at spotting unnatural ones. But (real) backlinks seem to still overcome everything else. They work better with good content, titles, etc, on the page. But those other things don't work at all without links.

[davidjnelson]

It’s weird, but I have a site where google has indexed tens of thousands of urls and drives hundreds of clicks from google search a day before even launching it, without any backlinks. Backlinks will obviously drastically increase both the number of urls indexed as well as the ranking for queries and give an associated click through rate and corresponding traffic increase. Kind of blew my mind traffic would start coming pre launch though, certainly unexpected. SEO is way different now than when I started getting heavily into it in 2003!

[rchaud]

Who even does backlinking anymore? If you link to an article on social media (where people are most likely to share), Google doesn't count it as strongly as an organic backlink that appears on a website.

Back in the day, people would create infographics and request other sites to embed it with a backlink. That type of link building strategy is old hat now, and feels skeevy to do if you're a funded startup.

[tyingq]

"Who even does backlinking anymore?"

Those "organic backlinks" aren't all so organic. There's a lot of grey between outright buying/begging a link and just hoping some links appear solely because you wrote such great content.