WRONG. I rank in competitive queries without relying on backlinks all the time.

So does Wikipedia.

I would say that if both Wikipedia and I can do that, anyone can do it. I’m hardly comparable to Wikipedia, so clearly there is a huge flexibility range at work in the algorithms.

Links are just not as important as the SEO community has brainwashed itself to believe they are.

good post as you give helpful information every time….it will help to all link builder…and link builder will take care of their link building campaigns after reading that.

@Michael – I would highly disagree with you on the 10-15% of optimization. You will not rank for any decent keyword without the right number of quality links. You can do all the on page optimization you like, but it won’t take you that far in the serps.

@Ann – I do about 10 hours a week analyzing backlink profiles for clients and their competitors and I’ve noticed one thing over and over again….bad link building practices.

I’ve been working with a handful if clients if very tough niches and almost every top competitor is doing tons of recip link exchanges, thousands of dollars in paid links and other not so quality methods. It’s dirty but I just don’t see Google putting the smack down enough. The majority of these sites do have age and quality content on their side, so I’m really wondering just how far an authority site can go with bad practices. I’ve even seen the BBC recently selling do follow text links to affiliate marketing pages.

Search engine optimization is NOT all about links. Links should not make up more than 10-15% of your optimization. But when you’re depending on bad links to begin with, they probably are not helping most sites as much as people have been led to believe.

Certainly after a few months a lot of paid links seem to lose their juice and vitality.

I’d say adding cleaner links is kinda like a safety net, but at the moment I’m not sure it’s really worth it. Best thing to do is try and gather the contact details of your visitors thus having less reliance on search engines in the future.

@Wiep, thanks for the clarification – that definitely makes sense.

What I meant with my comment in Gyutae’s post was that, from my experience, it’s advisable to clean up your link profile when most of the links are obviously paid for or bad in any other way. After all, when you’re planning on attracting lots of attention (for example via widgets or any other link baiting campaign), you want your link profile to look natural for the most at least. It’s not necessary to clean up every single link that looks a little bit dodgy, but make it look natural.

Also, don’t pull away all your links at the same time. Start with the baddest ones and move on slowly from there.

Oh, and thanks for the link, Ann ;)

About ‘cleaning’ link profile… I think those old links may not harm and I do not recommend removing them till they really matter. Until you get enough authority and then they do not matter anyway… whole thing is logarithmic, what that means? That means if you go to next level of trust, authority, value… all dirty things from previous level have diminishing value… like linking wikipedia from porn and other web sites would not harm it.