I guess, it depends on how you build your link.

Quality guest post, blog post so that people link to your site works awesome. Google is now all about content and soon will become a QnA engine.

But if you buy thousands backlinks from fiverr, IMO might as well spend the money for quality content.

Remember, google's search results is ordered by "integrity points of your website".

Hope that helps,

Web Design Melbourne

link building will never truly die. The thing is though, proper link building in this day and age does not resemble link building as most people know it.

In this era, it is far more important to be building relationships with other site owners from within a similar niche.

The idea of "building" the link implies that it is completed by one party alone. Whereas relationship building is a 2 way street.

Link building always has and will continue to be a valuable marketing asset for as ling as the fundamentals of the internet remain as is. Whilst link building is among the most poorly understood and aggressively abused SEO techniques it remains essential to the core workings of the Internet.

Link building has evolve so much so that you can't just go out and build links to your site for it to rank. To answer your question, yes link building the way you could 5 years ago...heck even 12 months ago no longer works as Google has become better at recognising the relevancy of the links coming into your site. In fact Google just doesn't look at the 1st tier links coming to your site, it looks at the 2nd tier as well. So if you were to build links from guest blogging for instance, you would want to determine the relevancy of the links pointing to that site, and make sure their relevant to your topic.

As for traffic, you can simply do some searches for your relevant keywords to see how many advertisers are showing up. If there's Adwords showing on the first couple of results pages then you can be confident there is traffic to go after through SEO.

SEO is always changing. I still think links are powerful, but only if they are relevant to the person visiting your website.

Focus on building your own ever growing website with quality, relevant and targeted content to your market and followers.

If others love it, they will link to you and share accordingly. The search engines will see this as a lot more legitimate that the random paid link farm alternative. Conquenctly helping you receive more SEO brownie points.

Link building is not going to die. How will they know that you have good content if you don't let them know?

Google doesn't magically index good articles.