Brian Dean is arguably the GOAT when it comes to link building.
No, not that goat.
The G.O.A.T as in the Greatest Of All Time.
His website is packed with insightful, well-researched and in-dept data. In a post updated in August of 2023 entitled “WE ANALYZED 11.8 MILLION GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS“, the findings speak for themselves: backlinks matter.
In fact, 3 of the top 5 factors (including the top 2) are directly related to backlink quality and quantity. Take a look:
The article is over 3000 words and would take roughly 12-15 minutes to read (as per thereadtime.com), so allow me to provide a quick breakdown of what I believe are the most important nuggets of information pertaining to backlinks.
(any) Backlinks matter.
One of the most interesting things the study found was that 95% of all pages have zero backlinks.
In other words: Webpages are mostly ghost towns when it comes to backlinks.
So having at least 1 link to your page already puts you ahead of 95% of your competitors.
Let that sink in.
Size (of backlink profile) matters.
Not surprisingly, websites with more backlinks do better in the rankings.
In fact, pages that ranked #1 had nearly 4 times (3.8X) more backlinks than websites ranking #2-10.
Quality matters.
What defines quality when it comes to backlinks? Essentially the more reputable, trustworthy and expertise a website has, the more authority it has.
Google explains it all here (sort of).
So we can basically agree that high authority = high quality.
Ahrefs.com have their own metric known as Domain Rating (DR) that evaluates the strength of a link on a scale of 1 to 100.
Also similar is MOZ.com’s Domain Authority metric, which is also widely-used SEO metric which is defined as “…a search engine ranking that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).”
These metrics evaluates the importance/trust/authority/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, based on their own proprietary algorithms (not directly related to Google).
The number of unique domains was also an important correlation with websites that rank higher.
But what about individual pages authority as opposed to the entire domain? Well here’s what the study says:
This suggests that a website’s overall authority will probably have a higher impact than just the individual pages. Meaning, even if your page has more links that your average keyword competitor, it is unlikely to rank well unless your overall domain is also benefiting from a better-than-average backlink profile.
What it means
It’s simple: Backlinks quantity and quality, matter for rankings.
Need more consensus? Sure. Here’s a quote from a Search Engine Journal article dated Feb 2023, that talks about the importance of acquiring high quality, natural links (via good content of course):
Rather than focusing solely on acquiring as many backlinks as possible, it is now more important for website owners to focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that will likely earn natural, organic backlinks from reputable sources.
https://searchengineland.com/how-much-will-backlinks-matter-392493
Content is still King. That will likely never change. However true that fact might be, this article is not written to debate the importance of content.
This article is here to highlight the importance of backlinks in terms of quality and quantity and how backlinks still matter very much in 2023 for rankings.
I believe backlinks will always matter as long as the Internet’s underlying protocol is HTTP – or at least until the machines replaces us all 😉
But let’s keep going.
Another article by GotchSEO points out how Google “loves authority”:
“Authority,” in this case, is defined as having a number of links from trustworthy sites. And there is overwhelming data to support this idea.
Nathan Gotch – Are Backlinks Still Important for SEO in 2023?
SEMRush has conducted their own study and conclusively found that “Backlink factors are extremely important for rankings.”
Conclusion
In 2024 (and very likely beyond) backlinks remain an important factor to ranking and is arguably a MUST for serious Google search rankings.
The simplest reason being that the Internet is built on links. That is how we humans interact, share and communicate on the Web.
Long live links.
