🔗 Missing link

Did You Know? “Consistent publication of engaging content” was the top search engine ranking factor, garnering 21% of the vote in a 2024 survey of search engine professionals. (Source)

“Backlinks aren’t important in 2024.”

If you work anywhere near organic search, you’ve probably heard that phrase stated with the same confidence as Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.

While hyperbolic—backlinks aren’t unimportant—there’s certainly some truth to that overconfident claim, especially as the list of corroborating statements coming from Google HQ continues to grow.

For example, as part of the March 2024 core update, Google made a relevant change to their Spam Policies documentation:

• Before update: “Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

• After update: “Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

This shift isn’t new, either. There’s plenty of primary sources prior years talking about the demise of backlinks, like a November 2022 interview with John Mueller, a Senior Search Analyst at Google, where Mueller says he believes links will only continue to lose importance.

Gary Illyes, a Google Search Analyst, made plenty of noise at PubCon 2023 when he said backlinks aren’t a top 3 ranking factor anymore.

But even after hearing all of that, you still see data like this FirstPageSage survey from Q1 2024:

I’m not exactly sure how they phrased the question(s) in that survey, which obviously influences the types of responses you receive, but backlinks still find themselves among the top 3 ranking factors according to supposed experts.

That pie chart is an abomination, so here’s the same data in a bar chart:

Just because backlinks rank 3rd in those survey results doesn’t exactly mean most SEOs still view them as the 3rd-most important factor while Google explicitly states that’s no longer the case.

That 3rd-place finish could be a result of how the survey questions were asked, or it could just be a case of “the field” (meaning everything outside the top 2 results) sharing the uncertainty with backlinks getting a legacy nod.

Of course, backlinks’ 3rd-place finish could mean SEOs still give backlinks more weight than they deserve. 🤷

Remember why backlinks were an important ranking factor in the first place.

Backlinks make up the individual strands in the World Wide Web, but, in many ways, they’re an archaic vestige of the Internet’s bygone early era.

Back when Google burst onto the scene, they needed a way rank websites.

• Exact keyword matches determined relevance.

• Backlink quantity determined authority.

It was like that for a very long time.

But as processing power and machine learning advance onward, backlinks continue to lose importance as a means of determining authority.

Simply put, there are better, less exploitable, ways to assign authority—UX signals chief among them, in my opinion.

John Mueller on backlinks

In a back-and-forth between Mueller and a non-Googler on Reddit, Mueller had some interesting things to say about focusing SEO efforts on backlinks (emphasis mine).

Interesting Thing #1

This comment came in response to a question about why a website’s backlink profile varies when using different sources, like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, etc.:

In his response, Mueller talks about backlinks as a tool for discoverability, not establishing or passing authority, and then mentions sitemaps. The take-home here is to focus on internal link structure, avoiding orphaned pages (those with no internal links), and making every page as discoverable as possible.

Interesting Thing #2

Mueller continued in the thread:

What types of things “make your website better overall”?

• Page speed optimization

• Voice search optimization

• User-generated content

• Conversion optimization

• Above-the-fold optimization

• Customer retention

• User engagement

Focus on that stuff. Invest your time and resources in a great user experience and don’t try to check SEO boxes like a robot.

Everyone say, “Hi!” to Mark N 👋

Question: “If you could have any superpower, but it had to be completely useless, what would it be?“

Mark N’s Answer: “My superpower would be the ability to determine the outside temperature with perfect accuracy…except it’s yesterday’s temperature.“

ChatGPT-Generated Joke of the Day 🤣

Why did the chicken cross the playground?

To get to the other slide!

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