All of you thinking this will not affect us are crazy.
This Yandex decision might not affect us, but it is clear to see that future ranking algos are going to devalue links more and more. (it has been going on for a half a decade now, and its not over.)
Google always has, and always will, change the algo when people begin to game the system, or more properly when this gaming of the system starts to seriously affect search results.
They did it with:
link farms
reciprocal links
site wide links
profile links
forum links
article marketing links
infographic links
Bio links in blog posts
and recently links from press release web sites
and soon, I bet, to guest posts.
Just look at the state of links today. Yes, many sites can still be ranked by spam, but no one in their right mind is running links at anything but a churn and burn site right now.
True Blackhatters are like surfers. But instead of reading the waves, they create the ones they want to ride. They understand the temporary nature of the wave. They create wave after wave, some small and hardly worth the ride, and some big ones, with a long and exhilarating ride. But no blackhatter in the world is ignorant of the fact that this ride will end.
SEO's for business are different. Dumping a domain is not an option. They are very careful not to do anything out of acceptable guidelines, and whatever they do today has to be graded against to possibility of having to undo it later. Many people who were doing "white hat" three years ago are gong in now and undoing their work.
Right now, in a strictly white hat sense, the only links you should be building are to actively promote your business, and the rest of the links should be naturally occurring.
Google has been stressing quality content and visitor engagement for years. When they can measure this without links, they will.
They need another metric to use to do away with links altogether. Social Media gave them metric to use to devalue all the commonly spammed links.
As soon as they get that last metric, links are doomed.
The Internet cannot exist wihout links, which is the main problem. Finding a way to rank without considering links will be a major blow to how many people do SEO today.
It may be a decade off, but its coming.
Think of it this way, what can Google do to hit as many spammers at once as possible?
Completely devalue all links.
Now ask yourself, what will Google do if they had the ability to do it?
Sit on it, or pull the trigger?
