Links Are Still Very Important for Google Ranking

[djbaxter]

New Google ranking study shows links are incredibly important to the ranking algorithm
by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land
July 20, 2016

A new ranking study on links published today by the Stone Temple Consulting team shows that links may be even more important than other studies have shown in the past...

The new study says there is a “near-perfect correlation” between ranking highly in Google and the links pointing to that page. This study aggregated the count of links by ranking position for the top 50 results across 6,000 search results pages, and it showed a near-perfect correlation between links and ranking. They used three different statistical models when analyzing the results...

Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, told Search Engine Land, “If your content isn’t competitive in relevance and quality, links won’t help. If it is, links will make the difference.”

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[jcorkern]

SEO's have know this for a long time, but there is a kicker to this, user interaction goes a very long way.

To me, it would be fair to say that links may get you to the top, but your content keeps it there.

I've seen sites with loads of high quality links and great looking link profiles climb to the top only to drop right out because of poor user interaction.

This is due to the Panda algorithm.

 

[leadscrape]

Recently Google admitted that the three most important rank factors (in order) are

1) Links
2) Words
3) Rankbrain

So yes, links are extremely important to rank even today.
But a few things have changed from before. It's not the quantity of the links, but the quality. A site that has 5 quality backlinks can do much better than another site that has 500 spammy links.

On top of that on page seo and internal linking is way more important today than was two years ago.

 

[Manju005]

Yes, backlinks are still important for a website to rank on Google SERP.