Update July 5, 2012: Matt Cutts (Googles Head of Web SPAM and Google’s defacto voice to the public) says “Don’t write the epitath for links just yet” watch the video here.

Yes, Links are still important! In fact they are the most important indirect factor that has an impact on how your website will rank. Every so often there will be a news report sounding the death toll for links and link building; it has been this way since our start in 2002. Despite the news links are alive and well and more important than ever.

What has changed with regard to links is the difficulty in acquiring new links, In years past most websites would have a page instructing would be link partners about how they could get a link. Years have passed and today most websites no longer accept link requests. They don’t have Add URL request form pages and its downright difficult, time consuming g and expensive to get links.

The latest news on the link building front was Google’s Penguin algorithm update launched on April 24th, 2012 whose chief targets were websites employing web Spam tactics which violated their webmaster guidelines, including those participating in link building schemes.

Since Google launched its search engine website including its page rank generating algorithm back in 1997 which included a heavy mathematical influence from the count of links pointing at every website on the internet, Spammers have been inventing ways to gain link popularity and scam Google. Almost as quickly as these linking schemes are created Google has continuously reinforced their algorithm to detect and defeat them.

Google has been successful in defeating allot of SPAM websites through the years, they have also succeeded in putting the fear of God, err a Google, into many an honest and non Spam webmaster. Today many website owners live in such fear of violating Google’s guidelines they won’t even say the words “link exchange” for fear their own website will be penalized and sent to wither away in the search engines deep dark pages beyond where the average searcher bothers to tread.
It’s a shame really because the good old fashioned link exchange was a simple way that real live people evaluated the quality of other websites whilst considering exchanging links with them. If Google has truly succeeded in killing the real life manual link exchange, they may have also killed the source of their high quality results.