22/11/2023
Gary Lllyes famously recently stated, “I think they’re important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links”,- which has many SEOs thinking, well, how important are backlinks?
To summarise, they are still important; there are no two ways to do it.
We would say they still have to be in the top 3 rankings factors; A.I.’s RankBrain has to be there, then content, so are backlinks still number 1?
We seriously doubt that backlinks are still number 1. We think it is more like the third most important ranking factor, but still, it is super important. That’s, of course, if you have quality backlinks because if you don’t, low-quality backlinks could act like a giant anchor, dragging your whole website’s rankings down.
Not as crucial as since the days of Google’s PageRank
Google’s PageRank mostly uses backlinks to determine where a website should be ranked.
However, since Google’s Penguin update, many businesses with spam links have received a link penalty.
We think, and this is only our humble opinion, but we believe Google is using more A.I., through Google’s RankBrain, to monitor how engaged shoppers are with a website, for example:
-How long is the average shopper spending on the website?
-How many pages does the shopper visit?
– How many shoppers return to Google’s search results after visiting your company’s website, or do you instead have a large percentage of your shoppers stay and purchase from you?
What are backlinks?
So, what exactly is a backlink?
Well, a backlink is an inbound backlink from an external website. It could be a do-follow backlink, so this will send “link juice”.
The link could also be a no-follow, meaning it won’t send link equity. It can still have some SEO benefit because Google and the other search engines want to see backlinks leading to a website which is a mixture of do-follow and no-follow, as this looks like those businesses have linked to you, but because they want to, not because you have bought the links.
Just don’t buy backlinks- it’s not worth it.
So many businesses see how many backlinks their direct competitors have, say over 1,000, and they are a start-up company, so they think it will take years to build that many links, which it often does.
Yet, don’t cut corners; buy buying backlinks; it is not worth it, as it will lead to a Google link penalty.
A Google link penalty can be algorithmic or a manual action penalty- in either case, the website will incur a sudden, dramatic drop in organic visitor numbers, and trust us, it can take a very long time, sometimes, to recover from.
Moving more towards- E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust; Google is looking for this when weighing how good content marketing is.
If your content marketing is very high quality, it may be on the first page of Google with no backlinks.
This is why we say U.X. factors and A.I. are now becoming more critical than backlinks, in our opinion.
However, as we mentioned earlier, in Google’s E-E-A-T, to prove authority, you need backlinks.
That’s because consider this: say there are 100 law firms in an area; businesses with a lot of quality backlinks from relevant websites to do with the law will often rank number 1 on Google.
Be crawled more frequently, ensuring their content is swiftly and regularly indexed.
Are all backlinks worth the same?
In a nutshell, there are backlinks, then there are backlinks- and what do we mean by that statement?
Well, quite simply put, any highly influential website, let’s say, Harvard University, let’s say they link to your business, then could give your organic SEO a massive boost.
Yet, a link from a blog that no one reads may only get, say, less than ten visitors per year; that’s not going to help improve the business’s search engine optimization.
Plus, low-quality links, so backlinks built to try and game the algorithms, to try and improve the company SEO, are even worse. These are called spam links; they will lead to the business incurring a penalty.
Link juice
So, all SEO agencies aim to send “link juice” from quality websites through to the business’s main pages, which will help them rank higher in Google.
So, let’s give you an example; take our business; we would want our homepage to rank high on Google, then the leading service pages, such as “backlink building”, “content marketing”, and “SEO consultants, so to do this, we need to earn backlinks to those main pages.
How many backlinks do you need?
The simple answer is that you can never have too many quality backlinks.
You can use too many low-quality backlinks, as your website will vanish from Google because a manual or algorithmic link penalty has been imposed on it.
But you can’t have too many good quality backlinks because there will always be a company that will build more; you have 100, they make 101- and it goes on if any business even has the slightest edge over your company search engine optimization, then, the following day, they may rank higher than your business.
This is why, with SEO, things never come to a stop unless the business wants to give in and let its competitors overtake them.
It’s a bit like Formula One racing, that is, it’s a constant race; if the competition builds an even slightly better engine, they will win the race, and this is the same as SEO, as a business could be overtaken in a heartbeat if the competition has more robust search engine optimisation.
Content marketing / evergreen and pillar pages
So, when we first started helping businesses improve their SEO, we wrote many blog posts, and the competition was roughly 500 words.
If this still were the case, our job would be much easier, that’s for sure.
As Google has been looking for more comprehensive, quality answers written by experts on the subject, the articles have gotten much longer.
It’s not uncommon to read a blog post on a digital marketing agency’s website that’s 3,000 words or more!
This is hard to write, but it takes considerable editing and refining.
Yet, Google’s EEAT wants to put businesses on the first page, which shows expertise, authoritativeness, experience, and trustworthiness. This often means writing longer, more comprehensive blog posts, often combining multiple perspectives from experts.
So, in summary, are backlinks still important?
That is the resounding answer, but the links must be quality.
