In a Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered a question from a web publisher who asked what to do about a suspected negative SEO attack. The web publisher asked if he should wait until he received a manual action from Google. John Mueller then stated that the links were likely normal spam links. Normal spam links happen naturally all the time. This has been the case since as long as I can remember. Guess what - in 2019 - it turns out that links and title tags still matter to doing well in Google's search results. We had John Mueller from Google said links matter for PageRank and thus building trust. Gary Illyes from Google say that HTML title tags also matter for SEO.