Has the Humminbird update caused links to be worth less or more?

[mark_baird]

As things move on will links be worth less as recent updates including the hummingbird update are moving further and further in the direction of content and social signals being the important.

On the other hand good links are becoming so hard to find, that may make them become more important than ever.

I'm trying to split my time up between content creation and link building/PR. which area should be focused on most. we have more quality content than we do quality links. our link profile is good but far to small. any suggestions what to focus on?

[mark_baird]

thanks ill look into that.

[EGOL]

Great to hear that your content is bringing in good results.

One thing that you might consider, if you don't have it already, is a way to give people easy access to your new content.  I have a blog where I make very short posts (these are noindex because they are only a sentence or two) about great content in the industry niche.   I make five to eight posts per day (you could also do the same but once a week or once a month) and these are sent out to subscribers by feedburner.  This has attracted thousands of subscribers.  The advantage of this is... when I publish a new article I give it a good position in the feed - and it goes out to 15,000 people.  That instantly produces some sharing, maybe some links and a lot of traffic.

Find a way to build your tribe.

[mark_baird]

I should have worded the question differently. More the future of search rather than a specific update.

Moz shows that to our root domain we have 34 domains and 4595 total links. We have been working on content for 6 months and i'm pretty happy with the results. We have a content creation system and the quality just keeps getting better so its all ticking along nicely. I could put more time/money but I feel we are ahead of the pack by a mile in our market. I think Point 2) of your solutions is the way to go as I feel we are just lagging way way behind links wise. So much so that our content just is not bubbling up.

Many of our competitors have 1000's of domains (lots of crap ones I may add) and i think we are just too far behind to ignore it and do the "build it they will come" method.

i'm a massive fan of content driven SEO, however i do wonder where the line should be drawn and where an amount of link building and network making needs to be done to get the content out.

[EGOL]

I'm trying to split my time up between content creation and link building/PR. which area should be focused on most.

If you are working on an established domain take a look at where your articles will rank without any linkbuilding.

When I toss up a new article (this is something substantive that might have 1000 to 3000 words and several photos or pieces of graphic art) it will rank deep in the SERPs.  But, over the next six months to a year it will slowly climb the SERPs and often rank on the first page of google - many of those will eventually go to one of the top three positions.

As an example, I published a new article eight months ago.  Right out of the gate it ranked at about position #160.  No worries I knew that it would move up.  Slowly, very slowly, it climbed the SERPs.  It took about five months to make it to the first page of the SERPs.  Then, today it is at #4 and pulling nice traffic.  No linkbuilding done by me but a bit of a wait for rankings.  I don't think this page will get to #1 because wikipedia and a couple very powerful sites with good content are up there, but who knows what will happen.

I am very happy with these results and instead of spending any time on linkbuilding, I am making my next page of content.

If good content on your site does that then in my opinion, linkbuilding is a waste of time - unless your article needs immediate results.  Consider spending 100% of your time into building content.  Every piece of great content has the ability to attract links, the more you have up the more links you will attract without any effort from you.

If you content on your site does not do that then one (or more) of these three things are holding your back.

1. visitors are not responding well to your content, then could be bouncing, not sharing, not linking.  For that to happen you have to honestly look at your content and ask.. "Is this the best article on the web for this topic?"  if not that then it must offer a very unique perspective of very high quality that will resonate with readers.  If your articles are not that high in quality then I would spend my time making them better.  The "no linkbuilding method" will not work unless your content is asskicking good.

2. your site doesn't have enough authority yet to project pages into high rankings, in that case you might need some linkbuilding to get your site strength up

3. you are in an extremely brutal competitive environment and will need to do more linkbuilding.

That's how I decide, and I am 100% on content building for all of my sites.  My comments here have nothing to do with hummingbird or any other google update.  This is not about Google's algo or updates, this is about building a great website.

[GPainter]

If I may add a quick one "build it and they will come" is a great idea but I still recommend you put it out to your network as people can't find your content by magic this is where social media and even if your niche fits it blogs can be so helpful, it helps you target the people you are aiming your content at.

[FedeEinhorn]

My 2 cents.

Just focus on content and a little bit of outreach/PR. Do not make link building. If you have good content, links will come, "build it and they will come".

I started focusing on posting some great stuff on our blog, including the images; a few days ago we got a link for entrepreneur.com because of an image we posted, couple days later 2 links to an article from SEJ and ahrefs. No outreach or PR was done for any of those links.

So, if you ask me, just focus on content, not only the words, images, video, presentations, etc. Links will come. 1 link from a good site, an earned link, is much better than links you may get by doing guest posting for example.

[GPainter]

I'll pint out he following post :

http://moz.com/blog/hummingbird-unleashed

and say again Hummingbird has not resulted in the drop of rankings its only optimized the way people search.

Nothing has changed good links have always been hard to find and they have always been valuable.

SEO wise for some time we've had to split our time (now more over more things). Keep writing good content and keep getting good links with it. Keep your brand in the social spotlight and interact with customers. There is no one thing to focus on or one strategy that works better than another. Some sites have one way that may not work on another.

The best way which has always been the good way is to make your site for the user, make the site really helpful for the user make that user want to not only come back to the site but share it with their friends. Everything from this will fall into place, just don't blame hummingbird as it's not hummingbird!

Hope that helps a bit and good luck.  There are some really good blog articles here on Moz that you can pick some tips on too!