Do we need links?

[The Baby Studio]

I see lots of statements on the web, saying your site must have lots of high grade backlinks, yet the larger companies dont seem to have any links at all

I wonder if links are a waste of time.

[Mike Hughes]

Yes. You do need links.

No. Links aren't a waste of time.

Can you give an example of any large sites that don't appear to have any links?

Mike

[The Baby Studio]

Thanks for the reply and sorry for the delay in looking back in at the community

I cant see any links here http://www.icandyworld.com/uk/en/home

or here http://www.britishairways.com/travel/home/public/en_gb

Maybe links can be hidden, but then what would be the point of them?

I have taken to occasionally looking for them when visiting big corporate sites recently - maybe I just missed them,


D

[chris ashdown]

If you look at it , Why would Google let something that is so easily manipulated be allowed to influence their results, when they spend million of dollars trying to stop people manipulating the search results, It just does not make sense, and therefore to me that is the biggest reason for disbelieving that they take much notice of links unless used on a regular basis.

I would say you are far better off making your site as user friendly as possible, with the aim of getting viewers into customers, Great Images and Descriptions, easy click through route without to many clicks etc.

[Mike Hughes]

Maybe links can be hidden, but then what would be the point of them?

I have taken to occasionally looking for them when visiting big corporate sites recently - maybe I just missed them,

Maybe you're looking for the wrong thing. You won't see the links on their site.

Links / Backlinks are links from other webpages to the site in question.

Icandy.com have around 5,300 links to their site
BA.com have around 258,000 links.

Chris, Google spend a huge amount of effort to identify all the different kinds of spam links people try and use and have put in place mechanisms to report these to webmasters and ways for the issue to be addressed. It seems to me far less believable that they would do this if links weren't important.

And yes, link velocity is important so it's not just a case of get a few links and forget about it.

Mike