The State of Links: Yesterday's Ranking Factor? - MarketingHub - Trending news, tools and tips for marketers

Author: Tom Capper / Source: Moz Back in September last year, I was lucky enough to see Rand speak at MozCon. His talk was about link bui

Author: Tom Capper / Source: Moz

Back in September last year, I was lucky enough to see Rand speak at MozCon. His talk was about link building and the main types of strategy that he saw as still being relevant and effective today. During his introduction, he said something that really got me thinking, about how the whole purpose of links and PageRank had been to approximate traffic.

Essentially, back in the late ’90s, links were a much bigger part of how we experienced the web — think of hubs like Excite, AOL, and Yahoo. Google’s big innovation was to realize that, because people navigated the web by clicking on links, they could approximate the relative popularity of pages by looking at those links.

So many links, such little time.

Rand pointed out that, given all the information at their disposal in the present day — as an Internet Service Provider, a search engine, a browser, an operating system, and so on — Google could now far more accurately model whether a link drives traffic, so you shouldn’t aim to build links that don’t drive traffic. This is a pretty big step forward from the link-building tactics of old, but it occurred to me that it it probably doesn’t go far enough.

If Google has enough data to figure out which links are genuinely driving traffic, why bother with links at all? The whole point was to figure out which sites and pages were popular, and they can now answer that question directly. (It’s worth noting that there’s a dichotomy between “popular” and “trustworthy” that I don’t want to get too stuck into, but which isn’t too big a deal here given that both can be inferred from either link-based data sources, or from non-link-based data sources — for example, SERP click-through rate might correlate well with “trustworthy,” while “search volume” might correlate well with “popular”).

However, there’s plenty of evidence out there suggesting that Google is in fact still making significant use of links as a ranking factor, so I decided to set out to challenge the data on both sides of that argument. The end result of that research is this post.

The horse’s mouth

One reasonably authoritative source on matters relating to Google is Google themselves. Google has been fairly unequivocal, even in recent times, that links are still a big deal. For example:

March 2016: Google Senior Search Quality Strategist Andrey Lipattsev confirms that content and links are the first and second greatest ranking factors. (The full quote is: “Yes; I can tell you what they [the number 1 and 2 ranking factors] are. It’s content, and links pointing to your site.”)
April 2014: Matt Cutts confirms that Google has tested search quality without links, and found it to be inferior.
October 2016: Gary Illyes implies that text links continue to be valuable while playing down the concept of Domain Authority.

Then, of course, there’s their continued focus on unnatural backlinks and so on — none of which would be necessary in a world where links are not a ranking factor.

However, I’d argue that this doesn’t indicate the end of our discussion before it’s even begun. Firstly, Google has a great track record of giving out dodgy SEO advice. Consider HTTPS migrations pre-2016. Will Critchlow talked at SearchLove San Diego about how Google’s algorithms are at a level of complexity and opaqueness where they’re no longer even trying to understand them themselves — and of course there are numerous stories of unintentional behaviors from machine learning algorithms out in the wild.