[Daniel Hynes]

Hi,

I was just wondering if anybody could give their take on backlinking and whether it is still a big player in SEO terms in 2015?

Thanks 

[Mike Halliday]

I was told years ago that Google like to give listings to real companies and it judges how real you are by how many references to your website they can find in the WWW,

so if you have 200 companies all listing your web address Google thinks " oohhh this company has all these companies mentioning them, they must be real so I will place them higher up the ranking"

But now Google uses other evidence to assess how real and important you are eg: social media, Google+, YouTube etc...etc

so backlinks from others are becoming less important, just like domain names , keyword stuffing  and everything else people used to manipulate Googles listing. 

Google does try and do its job as best as it possibly can and giving the most relevant search results possible is was it aims for, this is why content is becoming more important

[Mike Gwilliam]

The simple answer is no in my experience. Backlinks will have no effect on your web site nowadays.

Straight forward bricks and mortar SEO will though.

But now Google uses other evidence to assess how real and important you are eg: social media, Google+, YouTube etc...etc

Not necessarily. In my experience it has has minimal effect on seo and I have done a lot of work on that.
I have one web site configured for social media Goggle+ Twitter, multiple Youtube incoming links etc and it has had nearly no effect on page rank.

My other site (which I've spent more than a hundred hours seo work) has nearly no back links, no social media etc .....no nothing, zero and it ranks very high. I published an article a few days ago and it ranks near the top of page one in the world. The only thing it has has done is Purely SEO.......and as Micheal Cain would say ''not a lot of people know how to do that'' 

[derek west]

quality relevant and safe backlinks are still relevant and work well, but be careful where you get them from, any bad association can cause more damage than good.

[Carpet Dawg]

If you think backlinks are not relevant then you have no clue. 

A backlink from a social profile is also a backlink by the way.

Mike Gwilliam
What keyword where you targeting with the article? whats it ranking for? How old is the your website? Does the root domain have a good backlink profile? social media presence etc
Would be nice to see the website in question if possible?

I could also rank for an obscure sentence that no one else is targeting with minimal on site SEO.

[Mike Gwilliam]

Mike Gwilliam
What keyword where you targeting with the article? whats it ranking for? How old is the your website?
Would be nice to see the website in question if possible?

I knew someone would ask me that. The web site is around 4 years old. The key words which there are 2 off are relevant to the content on the web site in one particular area, and not a niche area. I would love to show you the website but then a lot of my competitors would see it here unfortunately.

But it as they say it's not rocket science but a lot of trial and error with just basic SEO....click through and conversion, which I've spent many years on. I really wouldn't tell anyone how I have done mine but when I started, to give a clue I studied how top and well known web sites are structured. I thought well lets learn from them.

[Mike Halliday]

I was Talking to a website designer who told me lots  carpet cleaner thinks they are an experts in SEO just because they do a website and it gets on the first page of Google, but it's really that carpet cleaning is not a competitive industry , if you want to Say you're good get on the first page with a car insurance or sex toy website.

This post is not aimed at anyone just saying we are quite lucky that our ndustry is a low value  market,  so most cannot spend the money to get a really good site, if our job values where in the £1000s then we could spend £1000s on a website. But we moan when we have to spend £200 on a site or we build our own to save money. I would love to see a really good website that was built by a carpet cleaner, I bet you could count them on one hand

[JandS]

Who knows...only Google so the people on here saying yes or no are only guessing...that's exactly why some say yes some say no.

[Mike Gwilliam]

Here is a very good post. And it ranks no1 for the keywords: ''Why do some web sites rank high''.

Some of the points are Age, Content quality, Cross linking (internal) and most importantly Click through rate & bounce rate.

http://www.quicksprout.com/2015/04/29/why-do-sites-rank-high-on-google-when-they-arent-optimized/

Who knows...only Google so the people on here saying yes or no are only guessing

There is no guessing game about it......if you have a good click through rate Google will place importance on it.

[JandS]

Your all guessing at what ranks for Google because you don't all agree.

[Mike Gwilliam]

Well it doesn't really matter as the original poster was new....came (posted) and went and maybe never to be seen again!

Perhaps a scally from the Wirral it seems.

[Daniel Hynes]

Thanks very much for your opinions guys. Much appreciated

[Ian Harper]

well said JandS

you can spend time and effort learning and using SEO to have all that work taken away over night. I speak from experience.

spend your time learning Adwords

[Mike Gwilliam]

you can spend time and effort learning and using SEO to have all that work taken away over night. I speak from experience.

Was that due to same/duplicate incoming  anchor text links? and was it outside your control?

I check my incoming links on a  regular basis. I only have a few and if I see something alarming, I get in touch with the domain (via who is) to have them removed and also have them disavowed. If the respondents don't reply, I threaten them with life changing consequences