Backlinks won’t matter- google

Well, l doubt that.

Backlink will always be a critical ranking factor.

Despite all the facts that google do not need to rely only on links anymore to understand and rank pages, which I agree, the most significant difference between backlink and other ranking factors is that "linking out" will actually harm you by driving your users away to other sources.

Let's suppose, even if link is officially not a ranking factor.

Nobody wants to link out anymore because it's doing you more harm than good.
And if nobody wants to link out, then nobody links to you either. There is no internet "web".
And suddenly google sees a site link out to others and think: wow this site really sacrifices its audience to link out to another site, that site must be good.
Then link will become a ranking factor again.

Other ranking factors may be all about how good your site is, but backlink is about driving your own audiences to another site to prove they can provide more valuable content which you cannot deliver.

But for sure the power of backlink will drop because it's way overrated.

sportsline said:

I hired a guy , I gave him only url and in 1 hour It's boost the URLs by 40% to 400% for EVERY KEYWORD the pages currently rank for, Only in 1 hour. Guy said It's works best for sites like with huge keyword rankings and it will boost them massively & my sites was on page 1,2,3,4 now main keywords rocking in top 3 position

The guy said It's Secret !!

What's the game Behind ? @Mr Positive any idea ?

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Who is this guy as I'd like to hire him.

Zombie Pop said:

I believe at some point in the future we will see backlinks becoming unimportant as a ranking factor.

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Until that future arrives, I'll continue to smartly take advantage of the power of backlinks.

HenryObi said:

Until that future arrives, I'll continue to smartly take advantage of the power of backlinks.

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I didn’t say don’t build links. But there’s more to ranking than just building links like we’re still in 2008. And that future is already here.

Zombie Pop said:

I didn’t say don’t build links. But there’s more to ranking than just building links like we’re still in 2008. And that future is already here.

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ranking,.yes. But keeping the rankings without having a single backlink I've not seen it yet

tazarbm said:

ranking,.yes. But keeping the rankings without having a single backlink I've not seen it yet

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No one should be misunderstanding me. I’m not saying backlinks are unimportant CURRENTLY. I’m saying the backlinks alone don’t do what they used to anymore (they are not as important like they were in 2008). You can’t just rely on backlinks from zero traffic pages and expect to rank. It doesn’t work, or at least not for me. UX shouldn’t be ignored. It is important.

What I did say is that I believe backlinks will not be an important ranking factor in the future. Not right now.

Zombie Pop said:

No one should be misunderstanding me. I’m not saying backlinks are unimportant CURRENTLY. I’m saying the backlinks alone don’t do what they used to anymore (they are not as important like they were in 2008). You can’t just rely on backlinks from zero traffic pages and expect to rank. It doesn’t work, or at least not for me. UX shouldn’t be ignored. It is important.

What I did say is that I believe backlinks will not be an important ranking factor in the future. Not right now.

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fair points

I clearly have no idea what Google wants anymore.

- high quality content / checked
- site speed / checked
- silo / checked
- mobile/desktop ux ui friendly/ checked
- 20-50 new high quality relevant links from high dr / checked

My site end up goes from #70 ranking > disappeared from search result. Facepalm*

While shitty websites, with shitty content and UI dominates pages 2-5

Something reminds me of this , she said Believe this is my first time!

And you keep building backink, despite google telling you not to do so now google have to lie.
But hey, dont stop building backlinks just because google told you not to do so.

Gogol said:

This is exactly what I believe as well. Google doesn’t need to take backlinks as a metric, and it only still exists because of legacy (i could be horribly wrong about this).

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Yes you are!!

Well, after doing multiple Tests / Case Studies: I have concluded that it's possible to rank without links, but only until someone comes and outranks and beat the shit out of you with back links.

Ranking is one thing, staying ranked without links I don't think so.

AuraMarketing said:

Wow! How did you find the guy?

And in what month and year he did this magic?

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He was in my skype list, buying other services as well.

irishrevolutionaries said:

Who is this guy as I'd like to hire him.

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Sorry I am not a broker

HenryObi said:

Until that future arrives, I'll continue to smartly take advantage of the power of backlinks.

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Backlinks is the power !

Zombie Pop said:

No one should be misunderstanding me. I’m not saying backlinks are unimportant CURRENTLY. I’m saying the backlinks alone don’t do what they used to anymore (they are not as important like they were in 2008). You can’t just rely on backlinks from zero traffic pages and expect to rank. It doesn’t work, or at least not for me. UX shouldn’t be ignored. It is important.

What I did say is that I believe backlinks will not be an important ranking factor in the future. Not right now.

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Very true

bluematter said:

Well, after doing multiple Tests / Case Studies: I have concluded that it's possible to rank without links, but only until someone comes and outranks and beat the shit out of you with back links.

Ranking is one thing, staying ranked without links I don't think so.

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Everytime content is king !

I am going, to be honest; I got two sites. I haven't built links to one with more backlinks and one with just great content. And to my surprise the last month, my traffic has increased by 100%, and I am holding a few top 5 spots for some of my keywords. I don't think they are entirely lying from my observation.

sportsline said:

I hired a guy , I gave him only url and in 1 hour It's boost the URLs by 40% to 400% for EVERY KEYWORD the pages currently rank for, Only in 1 hour. Guy said It's works best for sites like with huge keyword rankings and it will boost them massively & my sites was on page 1,2,3,4 now main keywords rocking in top 3 position

The guy said It's Secret !!

What's the game Behind ? @Mr Positive any idea ?

Click to expand...

Can you introduce me to that person?

Castamir said:

This has been the case since 2012, Google has been making use of other relevance indicators than links. This is why it's possible to rank without links

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And that's why it is possible to outrank those who rank without links.

We need to find that secret to rank without backlinks...

CTR is what I think is the most important factor... No. of page visits and bounce rate would do the magic I think.

I will experiment with something based on these factors.

Mr Positive said:

Google Predicts Strength Of Backlinks Ranking Factor Will Drop

Google Search Advocate John Mueller predicts the strength of backlinks as a ranking factor will drop over time.

www.searchenginejournal.com

another lie courtesy of google. … thoughts ….

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I think that regarding backlinks "less is more". I mean, as other already said, Google over time desperately tried to find valuables signals for off-page SEO, which is the harder part to analyze for them.

In that sense, links have always been the most important off-page factors, but also the most spammed.

They are trying to fight black hat link practices since the Penguin update, 10 years ago already, with poor results (PBN links still works and so do many other black hat strategies).

So, I guess what they are doing now is to give more value to semantically relevant links from authority domain, which means link from content to content that are topic-related and from domains that are not just a brand new domains with few articles about the same topic they are linking to in a different domain (so, for instance, they check if the referring domain receives real traffic, semantic correlation with the linked domains, etc).

Building less valuable links I think now it is just useful for link diversity. They don't bring much value (if any), but they help to "cover" the link building campaign and make it look the link profile more natural.

Out of the overall count of referring domains in a link profile, probably only a few (the topic-related from "proven" authority domains) will matter.

sportsline said:

Backlinks is the power !

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Not just backlinks. Neglect your content and suffer more than you could suffer in the absence of backlinks.

HenryObi said:

Not just backlinks. Neglect your content and suffer more than you could suffer in the absence of backlinks.

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Yeah This is true (y)

Mueller says:

“Well, it’s something where I imagine, over time, the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web.”

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They've been saying this for a long time. The catch here is ''over time/at some point will'' can be 2025, 2030, 2040. But exactly when?