The Influence Of Backlinks As A Search Engine Ranking Factor Shall Drop, Google Predicts

Google

Google pioneered, and kickstarted the search engine industry on the web using algorithms.

When it first started its life in January 1996 and incorporated in 1998, Google, as the research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used an algorithm called 'PageRank' to analyze the relationships between website.

It was PageRank that determined the relevance of a website, and the importance of those pages, by counting how many backlinks those pages have.

According to Google in one of its earliest blog posts, "PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites."

While this remains one of the key factors of Google Search for decades, the future may make this approach irrelevant.

In the digital era where social media networks is where people are at, and that more than half of the internet's population are bots, the web is no longer what it was used to be.

During a session of Brighton SEO, Google Search's advocate John Mueller made a prediction regarding backlinks.

Mueller was joined by Lizzi Sassman, also from Google, and a guest called Myriam Jessler and answered several questions related to SEO whilst doing a live podcast recording.

One of the questions asked, was how Google penalizes backlink.

"As an SEO, we are interested in backlinks. However, actively working on backlinks often becomes a gray area in terms of link schemes. What are Google’s main criteria for penalizing backlinks?" the question asks.

For most of its life, Google dislikes unnatural link building methods, and frowns upon all sorts of "black hat" SEO and automations.

Mueller as the representative from Google, cannot say more about one thing but not the other, simply because Google was originally built, and also known for its PageRank algorithm. And if he ever give out too many details, his answer could encourage "grey hat" behavior, which stands right between what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

So rather than explaining how backlinks are specifically penalized, Mueller spoke about backlinks in general, and they influence Google as one of the search engine's ranking signal.

And here, Mueller explained that backlinks may become less important in the future.

Mueller explained this by fitting the context of the World Wide Web into a bigger picture, suggesting that backlinks may start losing its influence as a ranking signal due to the search engine’s algorithms not needing to rely on inbound links.

"Well, it’s something where I imagine, over time, the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web."

"And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It’s like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it. But my guess is over time, it won’t be such a big factor as sometimes it is today. I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit."

Here, Mueller explained that in the future, backlinks may not be as valuable as they are, and may not be worth fighting hard to acquire for in the future.

Mueller suggested that backlinks are only helpful because they help understand content which invalidates all the other useful information they communicate.

A backlink profile helps to tell the story of a website, and also how much it’s trusted by other companies, and also how much it can be trusted for its particular niche.

This statement by Mueller adds up to what he said back in 2021, in which he told his viewers that the total number of links pointing to a website is irrelevant to Google.

At that time, during the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 19, he suggested that one good link from a relevant website can be more impactful than millions of low quality links.

"We try to understand what is relevant for a website, how much should we weigh these individual links, and the total number of links doesn’t matter at all. Because you could go off and create millions of links across millions of websites if you wanted to, and we could just ignore them all."

Published: 
14/11/2022