Do backlinks still matter for SEO?

Backlinks can still be a pretty big conversation for many an SEO, but are they as important as they once were? Or are they merely a verification system for search engines.

Whenever I talk to SEOs, I tend to hear a concept get regurgitated with the same force now as it initially did upon release: backlinks.

Every SEO knows this one, partly because it has been drilled into them from day dot. It typically goes like this:

Chances are that you’ve heard this all before, and been pitched it by some SEO touting shyster. It’s the standard of SEO marketing, and some genuinely believe in it above all.

But that’s not the only factor, and anyone suggesting that you can use backlinks above all, and that you should be thinking about them as your strategy desperately needs to update their game.

So let’s talk about why, about how Google used backlinks in the past, and how that might have changed, because without an understanding, this is just going to continue unabated.

What backlinks did

To understand what backlinks did, you need to understand PageRank, the concept that basically put Google on the map.

“PageRank” was Google’s initial algorithm that applied a weighting system to websites based on the number of links they received. It’s based on a formula of how links meant something, and basically applies a number of 1 through 10 on how popular a website is based on how many people link to it. The number, also known as a “PR”, basically informed Google of how well linked you were.

If lots of people link to your site, you might have a PR of 5. If you had very some, you might be a 1. If you were Google, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, and everyone used your site, you could have been 10. Ten was the perfect score, and next to impossible to achieve, though the other scores mattered, too.

PageRank understood backlinks by weighing up those scores based on how sites on the whole linked to others, spreading the power of their links — something affectionately known as “link juice” — to other sites, and was what made PageRank unique. The logic behind PageRank’s understanding of backlinks meant that it wasn’t just about one big website linking to a small website to improve its ranking, but how a bunch of smaller websites could come together and become a family, using their combined power to send their collective link juice and power up that site, so to speak.

Backlinks delivered that power, and were based on a model of the web where websites could be trusted with the power to decide which site was important on the greater web.

But times have changed, and people don’t always post links that way.

Beyond backlinks, there’s content analysis

Backlinks did one thing well, but they mightn’t be the big deal they once were. You could use backlinks to provide an understanding of the importance of a site, for sure, but specifically on a domain level. It was the difference between a website on the whole and a page on the website.

The thing is we’re often searching for specific queries to take us to specific articles and pages, not just the domain itself. Search engines needed to get better at understanding the query and what was on the page in question, and so they improved.

Much of it evolved into understanding the content of the pages being indexed, while also understanding queries, complete with spell checking and correcting the queries. All of this is important, because it comes together in a way that means the search engine is looking for the right page and the right content for the answer to the search query, and not just the most popular website in the search indices.

Technology changes, and search engines will too

There are lots of things that make up a search ranking for a page, but many still believe that backlinks above all can do it.

Throw a page online, pay for some backlinks, and bob’s your uncle, it’ll happen. Except it won’t. Or it might temporarily, and then Google will analyse your index, and then knock you off the list. And the SEO shister you spoke to earlier will tell you that you need to pay for more backlinks, and the whole process will begin again.

They’ll argue that the technology for Google was built on backlinks, and so that lends credibility to their idea of having more backlinks, of paying to get more, of you needing more, and so on and so on. But while it might be true that the thing that made Google what it was happened to be built on a backlink-based algorithm, it’s not the only thing that it uses on.

The simple fact of the matter is technology changes, whether it’s a phone, a camera, or even, yes, a search engine.

Take phones. When PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in 1996 and seen in action a year later, phones looked nothing like they did today. The Motorola StarTac was an example, and Nokia was beginning to build its consumer-focused approach, supporting the initial premium banana-phone, the 8110, with its slide out tray. All phones had low-end hardware, small screen, no cameras, and zero internet.

In 25 years, we’ve come a long way, baby.

The same is true of almost any area in technology. Search engine concepts in the late 90s might have been built from weighing algorithms, but in the time since, we’ve seen so much added, from natural language processing, structured data, local SEO, and a deeper analysis on what makes for a better site for users overall.

There’s a whole history worth exploring, but the point is a search engine concept pioneered in 1996 isn’t necessarily going to as big of a deal in 2021 as some might believe.

Backlinks still matter (but not for the reasons you probably think)

It may play a part, but it mightn’t play quite the same part, and that’s because there’s more going on under the hood than merely PageRank. Backlinks may still matter, but they might not have quite the same weight as they once did, if you excuse the SEO pun.

Google doesn’t typically comment on speculation about how its engine works, and tends to drop hints here and there provided you follow people from its search team. Watch what it says on X/Twitter and Mastodon, and then built your own thoughts, but one of the trends in SEO is that many believe backlinks are no longer the area that is worth paying much attention to. They’re only so much useful, but aren’t the be-all end-all anymore, and you should probably not be focusing on them, unless you’re a brand new website.

Anecdotally, one of the things I find about running my own site is that I can see some of this stuff in action. It’s one of the reasons I love being an SEO with my own site: I can try some of my ideas in real life before suggesting them to clients. By the same token, I can also track concepts to see if they make sense.

As both an SEO and a technology journalist, I can see if things work in real life for me, and then see if I can apply those learnings to others.

And for the few years my technology publication Pickr has been around, I’ve seen that the number of links it has — which isn’t small, but also isn’t massive — hasn’t prevented it from getting top position on some queries. Hell, it even manages to secure featured snippets at times.

That’s prime real estate at the top of the page.

Why has this happened? If SEOs continue to push the idea that a larger amount of backlinks leads to a greater chance, how does a site with a smaller amount do it?

The answer is great content, solid speed, and more of that SEO balance is typically what nets you this, appealing to the search engine by delivering the best of what it needs: content and technical SEO.

Backlinks may still matter on some level, but at this point, backlinks may matter as a form of verification for the domain rather than outward trust, and here’s why: anyone can start a website and add whatever they want to it, but if you don’t get picked up by Google earlier, and if you don’t show up in searches, it might be because you’re not being indexed.

There are ways you can do this, such as connecting it to Google Search Console and watching the indexation, but even then, it can take some time. A backlink from an established website, however, can tell Google someone else is talking about you. Several can start to inform a greater understanding of your website’s profile. It can flesh out that you’re not just “yet another website”, but one that should be on Google’s radar, because those links inform its engine that something of importance is being linked to.

And there are several people talking about the diminished importance of backlinks, and how this is all changing. One writer, Shaun Poore, wrote about it last year, while Forbes ran a piece from growth hacker Johnathan Maxim about how SEO isn’t about backlinks first and foremost anymore.

The point is there’s more to life and SEO than backlinks, and that’s because for a search engine to understand queries and content, it needs to understand more than how the website is placed in a popularity contest.

The simple truth is that ranking on Google needs more than just backlinks, and it’s not as simple as getting more backlinks. Instead, you’ll want to skip the spiel about how backlinks can be rewarding, and focus on a strategy that covers content and technical in a way that delves deeper for a search engine, rather than one that barely scratches the surface.