As we all know, link building plays a very important role in SEO that impacts strongly on keyword ranking.

In China, this situation changed a few years ago. The role of external links in SEO is getting weaker and weaker, and it is already a factor till now that does not work very well.

There are many reasons why external links are not important. Here are roughly few as below.

1. A few years ago, China’s external chain cheating was very serious, causing great trouble to search engines such as Baidu. In the case of unable to distinguish the quality of external links, Baidu lowered the metrics of external links.

2. From major portal sites such as sina, sohu, and 163, to social networking sites WeChat, Weibo, and Baidu Baike, they strictly control traffic. External links are strictly censored and banned in most cases.

3. Baidu prefers websites with good user experience. Websites with good CTR, PageView, TimeOnSite, and Bounce rate indicators are more likely to get high keyword rankings.

From the perspective of the future trend of SEO, the role of external links is becoming more and more limited, so that it can be ignored and will be inevitable.