Google Discusses Links Building

Google Discusses Links Building
Google’s John Mueller Discusses Changing Role of Links in Ranking. He took part in a Webmaster Hangout an insight into how Google uses links, and what he said may change how we think about links in the context of ranking content.

Mueller explained there are more signals beyond links used to rank web pages: “… with regard to looking at the link graph, we do look at a lot of different signals. So it’s not just links that make it so that we can pick up content and show it in search.”

He then shared an anecdote of sites not ranking and the reason isn’t because of links but because of the content. “It’s not that rare that I run across a question in the help forums or somewhere else where people say… my site is not ranking anymore… I look at it with the team and links are not a problem with that. …but rather everything else around the website or on the website being more of a problem. Sometimes it’s as simple as… you don’t explicitly mention what you want to rank for on your pages.”

How Much Google Relies on Links for Rankings

John Mueller then shared an interesting insight about how links are used by Google for ranking. He introduced the concept of links playing less role in rankings depending on factors such as user intent and other contexts. Here is what he said:

“With regards to does Google rely more or less on links, I think that’s really hard to say and it really depends from case to case.
It’s not the case that we have like a fixed weight and say this factor plays 10% of the role and this factor plays 10% of the role and those 10% are going to be the same across all queries and intents and across all websites.”

To read more on this, the Search Engine Journal posted a comprehensive guide to the comments and how they relate to effective SEO and the place link development has in this.