Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirming that he did indeed say those words.
Background links for classification
In the late 1990s links were discovered to be a good signal for search engines to validate a website’s authority, and Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide signals semantics about what a web page was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at end of article). The main finding of this research paper is that there are too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results by quality to rank web pages by a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as a target filter for authority.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, a way is needed to filter, from a large collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most ‘authoritative’ or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it initiated further research into ways to use links beyond just a metric of authority, but a subjective metric of relevance.
The goal is something done. The subjective is something closer to an opinion. Google’s founders figured out how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric to determine what to rank in search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at the end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of text anchor to determine subjective opinion. relevant to real humans. It was basically about crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of websites expressed through the link structure between each web page.
What did Gary Illyes say about links in 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stokes he tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
“We need very few links to rank pages… We’ve made links less important over the years.” @method #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes he tweeted a confirmation of this statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why links matter less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spam, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But in 2004 or 2005 Google used statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered by” links in web page footers stopped passing the anchor text value and in 2006 links near words “advertisement” stopped passing the value of the link, the links. of directories stopped passing ranking value, and in 2012 Google rolled out a massive linking algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of millions of websites, many of which used guest posts.
The link signal eventually got so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the switch to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google explicitly confirms that links matter less
In 2023, Google’s Gary Illyes shared at PubCon Austin that links weren’t even in the top 3 ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 core algorithm update, Google updated its spam policy documentation to minimize the importance of links for ranking.
Google Core Update March 2024: 4 changes to link signal
The documentation previously stated:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevance of web pages.”
Updated the documentation that mentioned links to remove the important word.
Links don’t just show up as one more factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevance of web pages.”
In early April, Google’s John Mueller reported that there are more useful SEO activities to engage in than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things to websites these days, and focusing too much on links will often waste your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank web pages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
– Gary Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google doesn’t need links
The reason why Google doesn’t need a lot of links is probably because of the range of artificial intelligence and natural language understanding that Google uses in its algorithms. Google must have a lot of confidence in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say it doesn’t need it.
When Google implemented nofollow in the algorithm, there were many link builders selling comment spam links who kept lying that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the beginning of modern SEO (he was the link building forum moderator on the #1 SEO forum at the time), I can say with confidence that links have ceased to have a big role in the rankings. it started several years ago, and that’s why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The anatomy of a large-scale hypertext web search engine
Featured image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
