Google: Links Have Less Impact Today Than In The Past - Search Engine Journal

A Googler shared that links as a signal have less impact than when Google first started

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In a Google SEO office hours video, a Googler answered a question about backlinks and rankings and offered the interesting fact that backlinks have less impact as a ranking signal than it used to in the past.

Backlinks Ranking Signal

Links and anchor text signals made Google a better search engine than the competition when it was first introduced.

SEO used to primarily be about optimizing titles, headings, and content with keywords.

After Google became important it was realized that links were the key to better rankings.

Whole industries rose to service the need for links, such as web directories and link selling brokers.

Various link building techniques also came to be such as reciprocal linking, comment spam, forum spam and so on.

Google largely lost the war against link spam. The turning point was 2012 with the introduction of the Penguin algorithm, as well as other updates to Google’s infrastructure (Hummingbird) which allowed Google to do increasingly massive amounts of link related ranking functions.

Today we are at a point where Google is able to rank links in such a way that low quality links are discarded.

Links continue to be an important ranking factor but it has been a...

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