Peter Berner, Author, Blogger, Writer

The Authority System Yes. Backlinks still matter. But if you are still buying them the way people did in 2015, you are paying for something Google stopped counting a long time ago. That is the whole answer, and the rest of this post is the detail behind it — what changed, what no longer works, and how to tell whether you actually need links at all. The honest short answer Links remain one of the very few things Google can use to judge a site it did not build itself. Everything else — your titles, your speed, your schema, your content — is you marking your own homework. A link from somewhere else is a second opinion . Google has never removed links as a signal. What it has done is get much better at telling the difference between a genuine second opinion and a paid one. That distinction is the entire game now. What actually changed Three things, and they happened gradually enough that a lot of agencies never noticed: Volume stopped working. A thousand low-quality links no longer beat te...

This business had to exist, because the way employment agencies hire for digital marketing is broken — and the people usually paid to fix it are often the ones breaking it. That is not a swipe at individual recruiters — although it could be. It is a structural problem. If you cannot assess the work, you cannot assess the person doing it. Most recruiters have never run a paid search account, never had to explain a falling click-through rate to a client, and never hired a developer to fix a tracking tag. So when they are asked to find a digital marketer, or someone who knows SEO, they do the only thing the model allows: match keywords on a CV, and then ask questions they do not understand well enough to evaluate the answers. They cannot tell a good answer from a confident one, so they fall back on the safest-looking signal they have — a degree. Which proves somebody studied something, often a decade ago, and tells you nothing about what they can do now. Digital marketing needs skills, te...