I don't think there's an SEO, link building or digital PR professional out there who hasn't read comments on social media or in media publications saying links aren't important anymore or have lost their value. Careful, though. I think that reading between the lines, what Google's representatives say does make sense, you just have to know how to interpret it. The better a search engine gets at understanding content and evaluating reputation the way a human would, the less weight a link's mathematical value will carry. Up to that point, I agree. It's just that, as professionals in the industry also know, Google still has a long way to go before its AI is efficient enough to do without this entirely. I had it on my to-do list to write an article on this topic to coincide with a talk I'm giving at SEonthebeach, but today some leaks came to light that, within my ability to make sense of them, I'd like to highlight a few details about linking.
/ Sources and reasons for publishing this article
First of all, thanks and credit to the sources Rand Fishkin and Mic King for publishing information I think is of vital importance to the industry. Google has been making statements for years that, even those of us who've been at this a long time know not to take at 100% face value, and these statements often leave us puzzled. Lately, statements like Gary Illyes's, where he said that very few links are needed, sent shockwaves through many agencies and professionals. Add to that claims that links aren't in the top 3 SEO factors and other similar statements, and many professionals have become afraid to work on their digital PR strategies, even when done properly. It's understandable that Google wants to put an end to link spam, and I'm the first to support that approach, but it's also not right for it to leave us unable to do proper work because our clients ask us not to get any more links since they supposedly add no value. We know that isn't true.
Gary Illyes and Judith Lewis. By the way, I adore this woman. She's brilliant. Gary too, of course — he always used to come to SEonthebeach 😉
Right, let's get to it. So, Rand published an article on his Sparktoro blog where he talks about receiving an email from someone claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from inside Google's Search division. Pretty scary stuff, huh?! I'd recommend reading the full article on Sparktoro and the one on ipullrank, since this article I'm publishing is a summary of what I've managed to make sense of regarding what specifically affects external links. I can assure you both articles are worth your time and you'll come away with a much clearer picture.
/ Links still seem to be pretty important
It's no surprise, but one of the standout points I pulled from the Ipullrank article is that links still seem to be quite important. Let me give you the literal text from the article so that my rough translation doesn't strip it of its value:
Links Still Seem to be Pretty Important. I have not seen any evidence to refute recent claims that links are considered less important. Again, that is likely to be handled in the scoring functions themselves rather than how the information is stored. That said, there has been great care to extract and engineer features to deeply understand the link graph. https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak
Our collaborator Pablo Horcajuelo, from the agency Sales Systems , tells us:
"The algorithm has improved across the board, including at spotting paid links, which makes it far better to follow an ethical, sustainable approach to earning links rather than acquiring them in bulk. It's nothing new that the context of a link and the content around it matter a great deal, on top of weaving the link naturally into the content." Pablo Horcajuelo
/ Fresh links
He also talks about a metric called "sourceType" included in that leaked documentation. As I understand it, and I'll try to put it as simply as possible, this metric shows an approximate relationship between where a page is indexed and its value. Picture Google's index as a library with different sections: the most important, most-visited pages are kept in the easy-access section (like books on a shelf at eye level), while less important ones are kept in less accessible sections. This system can affect how Google values the links from those pages, giving them more or less weight depending on where they're stored in the index.
He also notes that the higher the tier a page is indexed at, the more valuable a link from it will be. Pages considered "fresh" are also considered high quality. In short, you want your links to come from pages that are fresh or featured in the top tier of the index. This partly explains why getting placements on highly-ranked pages and news pages produces better ranking performance. As he puts it, this confirms that digital PR is cool again (I really like how he phrases it: "Look at that, I just made digital PR cool again!"
According to our collaborator Víctor Benéitez Panizo, SEO manager at Marketing Paradise, one of our certified partners:
"This leak shows that the link building people did years ago no longer works: you need links and mentions on quality, 'fresh' sites related to your topic, and the content needs to be good" – Víctor Benéitez Panizo
/ Authors
The documentation reveals that Google explicitly stores the authors associated with a document as text
They also try to determine whether an entity on the page is also the author of the page.
Our collaborator María Cerezo, from the agency Maktagg, shares a thought on this:
Something I already suspected, but which is now "confirmed," is that identifying the author on every post is hugely important. I've spent years doing SEO for Shopify projects, and for a while now I've been explaining to my clients how important it is to build an author box with relevant content, where you can see all the posts by that expert/author. María Cerezo –
/ Low returns until you've established credibility
As Rand adds in his post, for most small and medium-sized businesses and newer creators/publishers, SEO is likely to show low returns until they've established credibility, browse demand, and a solid reputation with a sizeable audience. To me, this is one of the strongest points here, regardless of Google's ranking factors. Improving a brand's credibility through expertise, credibility and reputation is vital for our users, and of course Google, to trust us.
/ Anchor text spam
Mic talks about how the documentation includes a metric for identifying spikes in anchor text called "phraseAnchorSpamDays." What it amounts to is that Google can measure how fast spammy links are being generated, allowing it to take quick action against these practices. So now you know…
/ The value of anchor text
This is something I've been talking about for years in my classes, talks and articles. In this case, it's in Rand's post where he says this:
Classic ranking factors: PageRank, anchors (topical PageRank based on a link's anchor text) and text matching have been losing importance for years. But page titles remain fairly important.
He also talks about how the original PageRank has obviously evolved from how it was first designed.
Our collaborator David Ayala shares this on the topic:
There are several mentions that stress the content of the target page the link will point to, and how if that content strays from the topic of the URL being linked to, its value gets devalued. That makes sense, and it's something we've been working on for a while now: links that are increasingly contextualised, and contextualised specifically around the exact topic of the URL we want to link to. David Ayala
/ Homepage value
Although he covers plenty of other things that, I insist, you should read in the original articles, one detail that caught my attention was how Google decides how to value a link based on how much trust it places in the homepage.
/ Disavow?
Something else that doesn't surprise me all that much is that nothing was found regarding Disavow. Something that obsesses clients and agencies, when in most cases it's completely unnecessary and useless, as I explain in this article on the "impact of Disavow." Careful, though — this doesn't mean it isn't in other documentation, it simply hasn't turned up in these leaked Google documents. But what is true is that Google has had SEOs train its algorithm with our submissions so it can learn enough. Something pretty common with search engines too.
/ Link spam
Among the documentation, the metric "badbacklinksPenalized” which according to the documentation itself reads: badbacklinksPenalized( type:, boolean() default 🙂 nil : whether this document is penalized by BadBackLinks, in which case we shouldn't use the mustang ascorer boost score.
/ Documentation links
Thanks to a great professional and friend, Natzir Turrado, I can share the documentation links that directly affect linking. True to form, he's studying all the documentation and then sharing it with the whole community. Amazing work, Natzir!!! He's also built a map of Google ranking feature module relationships with Streamlit
Natzir also regularly shares super interesting information about the industry. I'd recommend following him.
/ Summary
If you've been in the industry long enough, you know you can't believe everything Google says. My advice is to understand its overall approach and try to do your best work regardless, because every day that passes, they work to improve, and if they want to put an end to link spam and you keep doing it, one day you'll regret it. I'd encourage you to work at earning those important links as naturally as possible, on sites relevant to your topic, and to make sure the content on your own site and the content you publish in the media improves how users perceive your expertise and your brand's reputation.
From the article to practice
Raffi earns natural links and mentions on relevant, fresh media outlets for your topic, improving how your brand is perceived, inside Affinity PRO.
Start for free →