SEO experts and specialists have been stressing on the importance of backlinks despite Google’s John Mueller Tweeting “links are definitely not the most important SEO factor”. This comes not so long after he said to forget everything you have read in the past about link juice. We will discuss how important link building is to rank your website in google.
Links are definitely not the most important SEO factor.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) July 31, 2020
What are Backlinks?
Backlink building is one of the most common off-page SEO techniques. Backlinks are also called incoming links. In other words, they are links pointing to your website from other websites. Suppose that there are 2 websites A and B, A writes a great content on a topic and B likes the content and includes the link in his website to refer to website A’s content page. So, A gets a backlink from B which will be indexed by search engines and adds to website A’s authority.
Is SEO All About Backlinks?
Even after Google’s John Mueller saying that backlinking isn’t an important ranking factor, it is hard to believe that a page can rank higher by the search engine algorithms without any links on the web to add to its authority, however it can rank for a low competition keyword with a very low search volume.
Google’s documentation for developers denies these claims as it sets guidelines on their link policy and the rules on how their search engine evaluates them. From our Research and experience, we never came across any web page that reached the first search results page of a high search volume keyword with zero or even low number of high authortity backlinks.
Over the years, we have worked with optimizing web pages for different low and high competition keywords and none has been able to rank without backlinks. It is true that “Content is the King” but high quality content without being mentioned online by backlinks will never make it to any human readers nor will be considered worthy by the search engine algorithms. Therefore, we consider backlinking as the second most important search engine ranking factor after creating quality content that provides value.
Has SEO Turned into a link building proccess over creating Quality Content?
Some SEO consultants have been advising the use of automated backlink generating software that writes automated articles to help boosting the off-page SEO activities. Generating backlinks for your content is very important to rank your website or an article in google searches, however is should be done in a human way. Search engines algorithms has become very complex and they are being continuously updated. The modern search engine algorithms can catch such activities and search penalties can be applied to websites that use such techniques.
Conclusion
Backlinks are important to reach high search engine results ranks but creating high quality content that provides real value for your audience must be the top priority for any website owners. Moreover, search engine optimization strategy should never be all about only on link building despite its importance.
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