How important are backlinks to Google rankings?

[goodroi]

There are many moving parts to the secret Google ranking formula. It is constantly evolving and changing so I would be interested to hear how much value you place on backlinks in 2021. On a scale of 0 (no impact on SEO rankings) to 10 (most important SEO factor), how much impact do you think backlinks make on Google SEO rankings?

What (if any) sub-element of backlinks do you think is important (anchor text, nofollow, age, etc)?

[canuckseo]

Based on my experience (over 20 years) links are high - 8 or 9 out of 10 for importance.

While I can still rank sites just on links alone it is definitely getting harder to do so. But with basic onsite optimization, some additional content on some pages and only link building otherwise I can rank most sites for most phrases focusing 95% of my efforts on link building primarily

[Pjman]

@goodroi

Always happy to chime in when you pose a question because you are always super helpful to the community.

I think this is a question that needs to be answered every year. Because it changes as Google shifts the needle to whatever moves their bottom line.

In the areas I work with there are 3 ways to gain new customers and make money off of them 1) Content - customer information focused 2) Conversion Focused (Whatever your metric is) 3) Link Building.

When the pandemic hit I was blessed that my niche did well, so well that I could run out the box experiments and not worry about the outcomes.

I took all of my properties, well over 2,000 and broke them in 1/3; Sites that I felt would benefit from 1) New Content or Content bolster 2) Conversion Teams running tests. 3) Link Builders running wild. I Let it run from May 2020 until now (heck I'm keeping it going)

The sites that focused on new content gained huge. Link building came in second. Conversion teams improved to pay themselves, that's about it.

I'm not huge fan of G's business model, but focusing on content has been the big winner for me.

[Moiz Banoori]

So what you can do is check on ahrefs the most difficult keywords, and you will notice all websites ranking in top 5 have some sort of amazing backlinks. Besides, you won't see anyone below DR 40 there.

[not2easy]

So then, because the websites that rank well have a superior link profile then that means that they would not rank well without those backlinks. OR does it mean that they have all those backlinks because their content is worth linking to in order to share with the visitors of other sites? Which came first?

[martinibuster]

Bing is (imo) less susceptible to the influence of links across the board.

In less competitive niches I see some lower quality links influencing the Google SERPs but I put that down to those links being able to slip through because they don't pass the threshold of spaminess.

[saladtosser]

>>>OR does it mean that they have all those backlinks because their content is worth linking to in order to share with the visitors of other sites?<<<

Most of these backlinks (in my area anyway) (the real editorial powerful genuine links) are so very old, back when the site was worth linking to and there were few if any other sites covering the topic, so you could argue they obtained these links not because they had the best site but had the only site .... these old links enable even old non updated non SSL, non mobile friendly sites to rank above newer better sites with outstanding UX, content and security.

Newer sites that have been around since google introduced nofollow attribute have been on the back foot not for lack of quality or UX but lack of being around before websites started to nofollow everything.

Google valuing these incredibly old links on pages long forgotten by the website owners themselves (some of the webmasters could be long dead the sites are that outdated) are like gold dust. This is why expired domains names are so sought after, because obtaining these dofollow links in 2021 is near impossible unless you pay or know the site owner. IMO links (good links not the crappy directory, spam blog type) are 98% of the ranking equation and overpower everything else combined. I have loads of amazing links from places like Wikipedia and such but everything is nofollow for me now. Just my thoughts

[saladtosser]

Another factor why big sites (brands or whatever) have so many backlinks that no one really seems to talk about is the SEO myth of "linking to high authority sites gives your site a boost".

I'm not sure if this was started by google or SEO's but what you have since that are a millions of bloggers/sites linking to bigger sites/brands or sites ranking at the top for a given search in the hopes of having some SEO backwash from them, not because they believe they are the best, but to get something back..in reality all this does is cermet brands further into the SERPS and because they rank so well attract more and more backlinks for this unnatural reason (SEO backwash).

So Google/SEO's have really skewed "natural linking" to such a point you could argue is mostly all unnatural now, done for personal gain (SEO backwash, or money) and not for the original reason links were invented...Of course some people still link for the right reason but seems fewer and further between since links became know as the currency of the internet.

I'd love to see what the SERPS would look like if google suddenly ranked all nofollow links as dofollow and dofollow as nofollow, think it could be more natural than todays result because no one would have been paying or bartering for a nofollow link but the site owners saw the real and natural/editorial benefit of linking to them for their users, or they wouldn't have bothered!

[aristotle]

Which came first?

High traffic --> More people see the site --> More chances to attract a backlink from someone --> More total backlinks

To put it another way:
A site that gets very little traffic, no matter how good it is, won't be able to attract many backlinks because hardly anyone ever sees it.

[jediviper]

It depends on the market. So no, links DO NOT count so much for all countries.
I have seen examples of niches where the top 3 results in Google belong to websites with 0 or just a few links and they just rank there because they probably have much authority with old domains and good traffic. Also content is close to nothing or just basic.

[Ajeet_Kumar]

Backlinks are the Most Important thing in SEO off page activity where we need to do build Backlinks over different different platform.
we need quality backlinks for the website, It will provide us good traffic as well as promotion over search engine,

Through Good backlinks we are able for promote our website on Google and through this process we will be get good organic traffic.
when we will go for link building then we will also earn referral traffic for the website.

[RedBar]

I'll say it, someone's been drinking the Google KoolAid ... backlinks are good for the possibility of driving more traffic however, insofar as ranking is concerned and unless G openly contradicts me, they have very little to do with better ranking.

Simply be examining the SERPs results will tell you this, G is nowhere even near up-to-date with indexing and ranking therefore they obviously have zero time and certainly won't waste any effort in adding another algo+/- filter to their manipulations.

Are you a non-US business and want to rank well in G USA?

Set up a bogus US company with a local address and host it in the USA, using WordPress get some reasonably good unique widget text, a few decent unique images ... Or you could just not bother doing any of this and simply comply with the Gorg and BUY THEIR AD SPACE! ... That's all you need to know, enough said.

[FranticFish]

Traditionally, every time I try to reverse-engineer a SERP what I see indicates that links are VERY important: far more than content. In fact, for all the EAT / YMYL talk, what I see when I do competitor analysis almost always reveals two truths (essentially one truth, but flip sides of the same coin):
- you can rank rubbish cut'n'paste derivative unoriginal word soup with enough of the right sort of links;
- really good content (original, well-written, though-provoking) won't rank without links

When I crunch a niche sometimes I see the people with the best content at the top, but only when they also have the best marketing. Equally, I will see the people with distinctly average content but good marketing dominating, whilst the far more compelling and well written content languishes on pages 2, 3 and onwards

Lately I have seen some websites with very poor link metrics (N.B. VISIBLE link metrics, this is just what I can see via publicly available data, no serious sleuthing) high in the results. But then everything is up in the air lately with updates all over the shop, maybe this is the typical 'crap rises to the top then we scrape it off' nature of any major update. Or maybe it is Google trying to find a way to be less dependent on links.

Another thought: perhaps there are different slots in an organic SERP that are subject to different rules. This is not my idea (think It might have been Tedster's) but I have been thinking about it lately. We all know that Google pulls in different types of answer: 'people also ask', news results, other organic widgets. Even within a run of 4-5 organic results that are formatted the same, perhaps there are different slots with different criteria. Lately I was looking at a local hospitality term and got the impression that among the global corporates in the organic results (who had list pages with multiple providers) there might have been two 'coupon day' type slots for local independent providers mixed in.

[jediviper]

@FranticFish
you last point is admitted by John Mueller. Google mixes sometimes the results and compares the behaviour of the visitors according to what they see at the SERP.

[anewstone]

@Pjman
I can't agree more .
We run the 2 websites more then 10 years, other 10 websites for 5 years.
I doubt the methods of contents and link buildings for many years.
But it works until the year of 2021.

We're also running Amazon business, because I'm not sure if these websites can earn a good profit.
And now, I'm sure this method will help me for lifetime.

BTW: Maybe the video app like Tiktok will change ALL ?

[anewstone]

Wow, I was a member here in 2007 ! I read the google bible and found this forums. These years I come back to surf but never post .
I'm running 2 e-commerce companies, online stores and amazon.
How time flies !

[FranticFish]

@ Pjman

focusing on content has been the big winner for me

I think some more details would really be useful. You state that on around 650 sites you focused on content and those sites showed the most improvement from a pool of 2000 sites.

I think it would be helpful to know:
- were these sites that had never acquired links before?
- did they acquire any new links as a result of the new content?
- were any of them ranking previously (i.e. they were already established as trusted sites on a topic)?

I don't have experience at anything like the scale you operate at.

I have seen first hand that you can win by launching content on domains that are already well-regarded. I recently worked on a 'sleeping giant' in a small niche and won a lot of exposure with new content - but the domain had a great 100% natural link profile going back 20 years.

I have not seen anything first hand to indicate that adding lots of content to a domain that is not yet well-linked and well-regarded will change its fortunes just by virtue of lots of new pages. Of course, it could be that my content sucks :)

Basically, was this:
- sites already well-linked and doing OK, but not taking advantage of their Google 'clout'; or
- sites with little to no links that won Google's respect with content alone?

[EditorialGuy]

I have not seen anything first hand to indicate that adding lots of content to a domain that is not yet well-linked and well-regarded will change its fortunes just by virtue of lots of new pages.

I don't think it's about "lots of pages," it's about genuinely useful pages that search engines will want to index and make available to their users. Churning pages out willy-nilly, or to create ersatz content for every imaginable keyword (a la TripAdvisor in its early days), probably worked better 20 years ago than it does now.

[FranticFish]

@ EditorialGuy

Agreed - bad choice of words on my part. I assumed that effort had been made to source good information and to draft helpful pages that aimed to provide real answers to topics rather than just churn out content that was 'optimised for keywords'.

What I'm trying to find out is whether or not it had been observed that this sort of content - if added to a domain without a decent link profile - changed its fortunes in and of itself.

[aristotle]

Sites with mediocre content could be under a panda penalty. Improving the overall quality of the content might release a site from the penalty and thereby increase its google traffic. This could happen without a significant change in the site's backlink profile.

So this is one hypothetical example of how it might happen.

[FranticFish]

@ Aristotle - definitely, and funnily enough I think this is what happened with the site I mentioned above. Their home page only was ranking (and for some OK terms) but not one internal page had been a landing page for years. I found evidence of a Panda 1 hit and a Hummingbird 2 hit in Analytics. New content on new urls (of the old urls, 85% we did 301 and 15% we did 404) led to rankings for internal pages.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My 2 cents because there are many types of links...

- Links to homepage are a general vote, context matters (positive vs negative)
- Links to inner pages are a specific vote, context matters (related vs off topic)
- Links that generate traffic to any page matters (user experience data, popularity)
- Links between associated properties matters (does this site have a youtube channel etc.)

The days of site A linking to site B creating a bump in traffic by virtue of just being linked are over, there has to be "more". When I dig deep into other people's site backlink profiles I find that the best ranked sites always have backlinks from all the places you'd expect (news, hobby forums, related pages, places you'd expect to be talking about your site etc) and few from the places you wouldn't (mass blog comment spam, links from unrelated sites etc).

A PURE answer would thus be "most links don't matter, good or bad". As I said, gone are the days where you can link to your "Hello World" blog and have it become PR 6 without a single article. Today it's probably more important to get yourself as a webmaster out of the sandbox before you have any hope of getting a site out of there. Associations matter, more than backlinks in 2021?