John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, predicts the future of backlinks during a live talk at Brighton SEO.
During a live session of the Search Off The Record podcast, Myriam Jessier, Lizzi Sassman, and Mueller take questions from the audience.
Since it’s a podcast, the hosts respond to pre-selected questions rather than interacting with the live audience, therefore the questions are addressed as a group discussion.
The hosts respond collectively to the following query regarding Google’s backlink penalties:
“As an SEO, we are interested in backlinks. However, actively working on backlinks often becomes a gray area in terms of link schemes. What are Google’s main criteria for penalizing backlinks?”
After some lighthearted banter between the hosts, Mueller deviates just a little from the original question in his response.
When answering queries about ranking and punishment factors, Google representatives are frequently circumspect.
Google generally opposes any kind of artificial link building. Giving away too many specifics about the punishments could encourage “grey hat” behaviour or carefully navigating the line between what is and isn’t permitted.
Mueller talks about the backlinks ranking signal in general and why it might be less important for SEO specialists rather than penalties in the future.
Google’s John Mueller Discusses the Backlinks Ranking Signal
Mueller believes that Google’s algorithm won’t need to rely as much on inbound connections as it does now as the search engine gets better at figuring out how content fits in with the rest of the web.
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.”
Perhaps Mueller is arguing that since fines aren’t important now, they won’t be in the future when backlinks are less lucrative to obtain.
However, claiming that backlinks simply aid in content comprehension ignores all of the additional information they convey.
A website’s backlink profile may tell you a lot more about it, including how widely it is trusted, who it is trusted by, and how authoritative the site is in its specific niche.
Is Google able to make all those determinations based solely on the content of the on-page?
Inbound links’ authority component is not discussed by Mueller, although he does state that Google will continue to benefit from them for content discovery.
Mueller continues:
“And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It’s like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it?”
“But my guess is over time, it won’t be such a big factor as sometimes it is today. I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit.”
In Google’s most recent Search Off The Record podcast, starting at 13:17, you can hear the entire conversation:
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