There’s been a lot of talk about backlinks and how relevant they are these days. Of course they’re still relevant. But a lot of people have been suggesting that the death of link building is nigh.

On one hand you have Panda, designed to inspect your content and make sure that it is of a high enough standard. Then you have penguin, making sure that your links are in order and that you aren’t employing any bad practices. And on the third hand you have Hummingbird, which looks at how your content is presented to a human and ranks websites in terms of conversational search.

Penguin especially has caused a lot of uproar in the past over its aggressive policing of links. This isn’t without reason, links have long been the most effective way for black hat SEOs to manipulate the search engine listings. So, what would the world of Google look like without using backlinks to rank websites?

In theory, it would rely solely on content and how well this has been put together. Panda would remove all the poor quality articles, and hummingbird would help with making them available to long term search. Apparently not. Matt Cutts, head of webspam of Google, says that although there isn’t a version of Google available to the public like this, they have experimented with this in the past.

It did not go well. See what Matt Cutts has to say below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey