SEO is dead! thats all we heard at the start of 2025, from the experts and in March 2025 thousands of publishers saw their traffic drop. in fact, what had happened is Google has pressed the reset button on SEO especially will the crucial step of having a suitable link building strategy in 2025 and now, we have an opportunity to start again.
Let’s face it link building or backlinks was a huge failure, it was overrun with fraudulent links, links farms in India and America processing thousands of links a day and then deleting them only to start again to sell more links to the same customers again and again, under a new business name.
Is SEO dead in 2025?
Is SEO dead in 2025, is it true? has AI killed SEO as the search page has changed? Well, in short, the answer is no! and in longer form answer, the answer is still no, but SEO has evolved in 2025.
There is no doubt that 2025 was the year of change, Google has changed the dynamics of SEO in 2025. For instance, Google AI has taken over and completely changed the search page, leaving thousands of bloggers and link farms in Mumbai worried about their future.
Okay, so that was slightly inflammatory, but at least now you know not to buy any links from Fiver. They are worthless. The only people, who will be telling you they are not, are the ones who host link farms and are trying to sell them.
Link building is important, so do it right
Google essentially counts “links” as a vote of popularity for your website and are considered to be a top ranking factor with search engines. Yet so many people try to cut corners, and find a short cut, and sorry to break it to you, but that does not work anymore.
Links come in many different forms and there is an organic way to see that growth, but bare in mind that although not all links are created equal, they are important in their own way. Most people want to focus on on acquiring links from relevant, powerful websites and blogs – and you have probably all heard the cliche ‘quality is far more important than quantity’, whilst thats true, it is also misleading.
Let me explain why, Google has spend the last 2 decades understanding how people are circumventing the process of link building, and creating fake authority. And as such Google and Bing have picked up on teh tricks of the trade. And the simple rule in 2025 for SEO is, if you want to rank, and want to build authority, it must be genuine.
So what is genuine?, genuine means, your SEO strategy must be backed up by real data, that translates across web traffic, social media and page engagement. This means a well written post, with unique content, that answers questions in AI prose, with social media engagment and backlinks, supported by video evidence will look more appealing to search engines, that ones without.
A fool proof link building strategy in 2025
We’ve come up with an action plan to acquire links for your website. We did so by looking at your current link profile, competitors and industry leaders. We will be focusing on acquiring the following “types” of links (which we will detail in this document):
- Social publishing platforms Like Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, Reddit etc to write and link to your content.
- Social media posting and engagement – Meta, TikTok, Instagram and X are very important and although the link does not count as back link- it does help search engines qualify your authenticity.
- Blogger outreach – A good press or blogger strategy will get your product or service traction in an organic way.
- Guest posting – still important to provide context and authority for the author
- Reviews on news sites like WTX News, CNN and News-briefing.com are good because they send you genuine traffic that is usually engaged because they come from a good source.
- Resource pages – A wiki listing is important, as it will provide authority to your site and allows for you to create sub pages to promote you post
- YouTube videos – Google uses Youtube videos as much as it can. posting a relevant video on the issue, will provide topical authority. as long as it is engaging.
- AI answers – Finally you must write in a AI friendly style, and use the relevant schema markup so AI bots can find the content
You have to remember, it is 2025 and if you are not doing these things, then search engines will not reward you. It is the generation of AI and this is how the next generation consume content.
Link Profile Analysis
A pre-launch checklist for SEO 2025
Before you start your SEO journey in 2025 here is a list of things to do, to ensure you are ready.
- Deep review of current link profile for quality, strategy and timelines
- Schema markup is set up
- Your Google search console and sitemaps are submitted
- Head to head comparison vs top competitors
- Action items to move forward
- DON’T BUY LINKS FROM LINKS FARMS – If someone reaches out saying they will give you contextual links for $200, say no thank you. Google knows these links farms and the value of these links hold no authority.
A deep spam check
Generally speaking, Google doesn’t penalise websites for spammy links, the algorithm is smart enough to ignore them. That means unless there are egregiously spammy links pointing to your domain, no action is needed. We ran an analysis of the following items to ensure there’s no spammy links holding your website back.
| Item | Analysis |
| Over-optimised anchor texts (too many exact match) | Not an issue. Short blurb here |
| Spammy anchor text (adult, gambling, etc) | Not an issue. Short blurb here |
| ccTLD distribution (.ru, etc) | Not an issue. Short blurb here |
| Link velocity (spikes, drop offs, etc) | Not an issue. Short blurb here |
| Low quality links | Not an issue. Short blurb here |
| Negative SEO attack | Not an issue. Short blurb here |
How to analyse your domain authority vs the competition
- During the keyword research process, we recorded the Domain Authority (DA) of the top 3 competitors for each of your target keywords.
- Doing so allows us to understand the “authority” of your competition for the keywords we’re targeting.
- When we look at your DA compared to the industry, you are [FILL IN THEIR STATUS HERE].
- Please note, the goal here is NOT to chase “authority”, this is simply to frame our analysis for links + time needed to rank for your keywords.
Final thought
Don’t forget, Google has not perfected AI, so it has provided an opportunity for people to take advantage of the new algorithm and just like them, you can also benefit, by creating great content and then creating an AI ready page. Oh and here’s a tip, you can ask AI to help you get the schema and tech stuff right for your post!