That looks correct to me, that's how it's set up here. And the error message disappeared. Very strange.
drwxr-xr-x 2 user root
means d for directory, read-write-execute for owner, read-execute for the rest, owner is userr, group is root. (when 'execute' is used on directories it really means 'access to directory').

The access bits for the symbolic link doesn't matter.