SEO Strategy

2020 SEO Trends: Is SEO Limited to Link Building?

R Ron Tsantker · · 2 min read
2020 SEO Trends: Is SEO Limited to Link Building?

SEO experts will suggest that backlinks from authoritative and resourceful websites are one of the most effective ways to have Google algorithms rank your website high on search pages.

However, saying that Search engine optimization is only about or limited to link building is getting the concept wrong. SEO is a collation of various tasks and activities that help search engines like Google to perceive your site as trustworthy and resource-worthy and hence rank it higher for relevant keyword searches. 

IS SEO limited to only link building?

No. Even in 2020, the trend about SEO is not just about focusing on building internal links and backlinks; though backlinks are one of the best ways for the search engine to decide the quality of your website.

This means that you cannot ignore the system of building qualitative external and internal links to and from your site by continuing to partner with superlative sites for links.

Just like Google algorithms are composite with highly sophisticated and complicated processes that help them judge a site’s ranking; similarly, SEO is a compound activity that requires multiple processes to be performed together to achieve desired results.

Hence, SEO is not limited to just one single activity – it is multi-faceted and needs the user to incorporate various techniques like on-page optimization, off-page optimization, link building, technical and coding optimization, content optimization, mobile responsiveness and more for best results. 

Is link building going to be important in 2020?

Yes. Activities around backlinking are going to get even more focused and competitive this year. Most marketers and brands believe that link building will now become an offset of brand building.

The better customers like or love your brand, the more will they share your website links helping you directly get some credible backlinks. It is important to remember here that external links have always been given more priority by Google than internal links.

This is why brands and websites must work with more drive on optimizing their brand image to get credit-worthy external links.

Backlink building – things to avoid

Since building links still occupies a superior position in search engine optimization, many site owners’ resort to malpractices to get note-worthy links and backlinks. It, however, does not work with Google crawlers and enforcement teams noticing such scrupulousness fast.

Remember, link building needs to be an organic activity – it needs to be done with meticulous zeal and subject-matter knowledge. These are a few violation examples:

  • In a recent activity, John Mueller, the trends analyst at Google webmaster pointed out that certain sites are contacting other site owners citing that they need credit for images being used on their sites. Even if they are not the legal owners of the images, they are demanding credit in the form of backlinks. Google intends to investigate this as more such complaints are coming to the forefront.
  • Other violations include – paying writers to write on topics without any subject-matter knowledge or using duplicate contents on your site or publishing the same article across multiple sites.

Our backlinks have companies ranking for 17,793 keywords in Google's top three.



Day one: position 32.
Today, number one on a 74,000-a-month keyword.

Same machine, a different client: a 135,000-a-month keyword also sits at number one.

Nearly six thousand of those are at number one — across twenty-six different client programs, not one lucky site.

Counted in Google Search Console across those twenty-six properties, at average position over the twenty-eight days to 4 August 2026. The long tail is in there — plenty of those queries are searched a handful of times a month. Our own hand-tracked set of commercial keywords is the stricter cut: 1,518 in the top three, 670 at number one.

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The Profit Labs rank tracker dashboard, showing a card per client program with a daily position sparkline, average position, keyword count, and counts of keywords in the top three, top ten and top one hundred.
The live rank tracker, eight of twenty-six programs. Client names and domains are blurred — they didn't sign up to appear in an advert. Every position, count and delta is untouched.