Does backlinking still work in 2024?

It will works as far as search engine survive.

You cannot survive in industry without backlinks. Seo is very competitive now and even for smaller keywords , webmasters are spending good amount on backlinks.

I have ranked some sites without backlinks but I have to care about other aspects like updating content frequently. Maintaining good load time for site is also a must .

Honestly, I keep asking myself this question over and over again because these days, it seems like a whole different game.

A few days after indexing an article with an average of 500 searches (moderately competitive) on a 2 month old site (local TLD), it climbed to the #4 spot on page 1.

We were getting enviable traffic impressions but almost zero clicks. Although the keywords (we were ranking 5, 6, 7 across the keyword variations) were transactional, we decided to send some backlinks its way—PBNs, social links, and all of that. Then, Google decided it wasn't worth the spot and began to drop it.

My confusion is:

Is it because we decided to monetize the content with affiliate links, or was it due to the backlinks..

umbreno said:

I have been following my friends site in ecommerce. It’s a seven/eight figure business that was topping the serps for High difficulty keywords in 2020 and a cornerstone of his success at the time was your typical pbn style backlinking.

Now in 2024 he’s barely making the third page for many of the same keywords.

Nothing has changed regarding his strategy since 2020 with the only exception being he was using AI to generate on-page written content. He’s blaming those for his setbacks but i’m not convinced as i’ve seen other examples of backlinking amounting to nothing over the past year or so specifically.

Has the game changed?

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The SEO landscape has definitely evolved. The decline in your friend's rankings likely stems from more than just AI-generated content. Search engines have become increasingly sophisticated in identifying PBNs and other manipulative tactics. Quality, relevance, and natural backlink profiles are more critical now than ever before. It's time to adapt to the new rules of the game.

Backlinks are useful but junklinks are useless. The ones that are sold are usually completely junklinks. You need to find the right sellers/sites.

it's more of quality now, A single $2500 guest post will get you better results than 100 other guest posts (read link farms).

It's depend on quality mate.

hideath said:

the game has changed for sure,
the thing is, trash and low quality links doesn't really make any difference nowadays,
you need to get solid links if you want to rank for any decent keywords and that's what most people avoiding "trying to save up" or make greater ROI,
most people fail because they're getting these kind of links or/and getting links from websites that have such links so link juice doesn't simply pass

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Yes backlinks must be good and reliable and if you pay for bad quality backlinks, you're basically throwing money in the trash.