Item — HN Reader

Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web.

Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places.

Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine

4 comments

That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links.

Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.

Google collects immense of data about people's actual visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative things were You don't need the proxy when you have the record of where people actually visit.

That's very effective for the top results. But if legit sites cannot rank in the first spots they'll get orders of magnitude fewer visits than the scam sites that employ SEO hacks to get the first places.

Like the backlink spammers on the article, which are winning?

but yea "narrative"

Interesting, but this does not seem to match empirical evidence by the likes of Ahrefs, which suggests that links are by far the most important ranking factor.

Go on...

Nice try black hat SEO person :-)