Mohsen Avid, CEO of Kholase Agency, explains why modern SEO is moving away from bulk link building and why trust, relevance, authority, and editorial credibility have become the real currency of search visibility.
For years, link building was treated as one of the fastest ways to influence search rankings. Many businesses, agencies, and website owners believed that the more backlinks they could acquire, the stronger their SEO performance would become. But according to Mohsen Avid, CEO of Kholase Agency, that era is no longer relevant to the realities of modern search.
Avid argues that the search landscape has changed dramatically. Google is no longer simply counting links; it is evaluating context, trust, relevance, source quality, editorial value, and the relationship between the linking page and the target website. In this new environment, one strong backlink from a credible, relevant, and authoritative source can be more valuable than hundreds or even thousands of low-quality links created only for manipulation.
“Mass link building used to work because search engines had fewer ways to understand quality,” Avid says. “Today, the situation is completely different. A backlink is not just a link anymore; it is a trust signal. If that signal comes from a weak, irrelevant, or artificial source, it may do nothing for the brand. In some cases, it can even damage the site’s credibility.”
Link Building Has Shifted From Quantity to Trust
According to Avid, the biggest mistake many businesses still make is looking at backlinks as numbers on a report. They ask how many links were built in a month, how many domains were added, or how quickly a campaign can scale. But this mindset, he believes, belongs to an older version of SEO.
Modern search engines are much better at detecting artificial patterns. A sudden increase in links from unrelated websites, low-quality blogs, expired domains, automatically generated pages, or irrelevant directories no longer represents real authority. Instead, it can look like an attempt to manipulate rankings.
Avid explains that effective link building today is closer to “trust architecture” than a technical SEO trick.
“A good backlink should make sense even if Google did not exist,” he says. “If a reputable website mentions your brand because your content, expertise, data, service, or insight adds value to its audience, that link has real meaning. But if the only reason the link exists is to influence rankings, it is probably not a strong long-term asset.”
This is why professional SEO strategies now focus less on volume and more on link quality, topical relevance, editorial placement, brand credibility, and the authority of the referring source.
Why Low-Quality Backlinks No Longer Create Sustainable Growth
In the early days of SEO, backlinks were often seen as votes. The more votes a website had, the stronger it appeared to search engines. But as the web became flooded with spam, private blog networks, paid placements, link farms, and automated content, Google’s systems became more advanced.
Today, a low-quality backlink may be ignored entirely. Worse, if a site builds a suspicious pattern of manipulative links, it may lose trust in the eyes of search engines.
Avid believes this is where many brands misunderstand the risk.
“The danger is not only that poor backlinks fail to help,” he says. “The bigger danger is that they create a weak digital footprint around your brand. When your name appears across irrelevant, low-value, or suspicious websites, you are not building authority. You are building noise.”
For businesses operating in competitive markets, this distinction matters. A brand that invests in strategic, high-quality backlinks may build long-term authority, while another brand that buys large packages of cheap links may see temporary movement followed by stagnation, volatility, or ranking loss.
In Avid’s view, sustainable SEO is not about creating artificial momentum. It is about building a reputation that search engines can understand and users can trust.
Relevance Is Now More Important Than Raw Domain Metrics
Many SEO campaigns still rely heavily on metrics such as domain authority, domain rating, traffic estimates, or spam scores. While these indicators can be useful, Avid warns that they should never replace human judgment.
A backlink from a high-metric website is not automatically valuable if the content is irrelevant, the page is weak, the placement looks unnatural, or the audience has no connection to the target business.
“For example, if a financial technology company receives a backlink from a strong but completely unrelated lifestyle blog, the value may be limited,” Avid explains. “But if that same company earns a link from a respected fintech publication, a market research article, a financial education platform, or a relevant business analysis page, the signal becomes much stronger.”
This is where topical relevance becomes essential. Search engines increasingly evaluate not only who links to a website, but why that link exists and whether the connection between the two sources makes sense.
Avid believes that this shift has made link building more strategic and more demanding. It requires understanding the brand, the industry, the search landscape, the audience, and the type of sources that can genuinely support authority.
Editorial Links Are More Valuable Than Manufactured Links
One of the strongest distinctions in modern link building is the difference between editorial links and manufactured links.
Editorial links are placed naturally within content because the linked source adds value to the article. Manufactured links, on the other hand, often exist only because someone paid for placement, exchanged links, used automation, or inserted the link without real editorial reason.
Avid argues that editorial context is one of the most important factors in backlink quality.
“A backlink inside a meaningful article, surrounded by relevant context, written for real readers, is completely different from a random link placed in a weak paragraph on a generic site,” he says. “Google is becoming better at understanding this difference.”
This is why link building should not be separated from content strategy. A brand must create assets worth linking to: original research, expert commentary, practical guides, case studies, tools, data reports, industry analysis, strong educational content, and clear service pages that solve real user problems.
For example, a company that wants to strengthen its SEO authority should not only ask where it can place links. It should ask what it has created that deserves to be cited.
This is also why agencies such as Kholase Agency
focus on SEO as a broader authority-building process, not just a backlink acquisition service.
The Role of Brand Mentions in Modern SEO
Avid also points out that modern authority is not built only through clickable backlinks. Brand mentions, citations, expert references, interviews, news coverage, social proof, and presence across credible platforms all contribute to how a brand is perceived online.
In other words, link building is no longer isolated from digital PR, content marketing, reputation management, and brand positioning.
“Search engines are trying to understand the real world,” Avid says. “They want to know which brands are being talked about, where they are mentioned, who mentions them, and whether those mentions come from trustworthy environments.”
This means that a strong off-page SEO strategy should include more than traditional backlink outreach. It should include thought leadership, expert articles, industry commentary, founder visibility, public relations, guest contributions, strategic partnerships, and consistent brand presence across relevant digital ecosystems.
For Avid, the future of link building is not about hiding behind technical tricks. It is about becoming a brand that deserves to be referenced.
AI Search Makes Backlink Quality Even More Important
The rise of AI-powered search engines has added another layer to the discussion. Tools such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and other generative engines rely heavily on trusted sources when producing answers.
Avid believes this makes authority signals even more important than before.
“If AI systems are going to summarize the web, they need to decide which sources deserve to be trusted,” he says. “That decision will not be based only on keywords. It will be based on credibility, consistency, expertise, citations, and the strength of the brand’s digital footprint.”
In this environment, low-quality backlinks are unlikely to help a brand become a trusted source for AI-generated answers. High-quality mentions and backlinks from credible sources, however, can strengthen the signals that help search systems recognize a brand as reliable.
This is why Avid believes that the next stage of SEO will merge link building, digital PR, entity building, and generative engine optimization.
“The question is no longer just: Can we rank on Google?” he says. “The question is: Can search engines and AI systems understand that our brand is a trustworthy authority in this subject?”
What Businesses Should Do Instead of Buying Bulk Links
Avid recommends that businesses stop treating backlinks as cheap inventory and start treating them as reputation assets.
His advice begins with auditing the current backlink profile. Brands should identify toxic, irrelevant, suspicious, or low-value links and understand whether their off-page footprint supports or weakens their positioning.
The second step is defining topical authority. A business should know which subjects it wants to be recognized for and then build backlinks from sources connected to those subjects.
The third step is investing in linkable assets. Instead of producing generic content, brands should create resources that journalists, bloggers, researchers, industry writers, and niche websites have a real reason to mention.
The fourth step is building relationships. High-quality backlinks often come from real connections: media relations, partnerships, expert commentary, interviews, guest publishing, data collaboration, and industry participation.
The fifth step is measuring link quality beyond numbers. Avid suggests looking at relevance, page context, traffic quality, editorial standards, source reputation, audience match, anchor naturalness, and long-term brand value.
The Future Belongs to Brands That Build Authority, Not Noise
Avid believes the future of link building will be shaped by the same principle that now defines modern SEO as a whole: trust.
Websites that try to manipulate rankings with mass-produced, low-quality backlinks may still create short-term movement in some cases, but they will struggle to build durable visibility. On the other hand, brands that invest in credibility, expert content, editorial mentions, and strong relationships will become harder to replace.
“The strongest backlink is not the one you force into existence,” Avid concludes. “The strongest backlink is the one that belongs there. When another credible source links to you because your brand, content, expertise, or data genuinely improves their page, that is real authority. And in modern SEO, real authority is what survives.”
For businesses, the message is clear: link building is not dead, but its old methods are. The era of bulk backlinks, artificial placements, and meaningless domain lists is fading. The new era belongs to brands that understand one simple truth: one quality backlink, placed in the right context, from the right source, can be worth more than a thousand links that nobody trusts.
