John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, Believes that the Importance of Backlinks Will Fade Away Over Time as a Ranking Factor

During a live session at Brighton SEO, Google Search Advocate John Mueller made a prediction about the future of backlinks and the weight they will serve as a ranking factor for SEO.

When answering questions about ranking and penalty criteria, Google representatives are usually hesitant. Google generally opposes any kind of unnatural link-building. Giving away too many specifics about the punishments could encourage “grey hat” behavior or carefully navigating the line between what is and isn’t acceptable. Mueller talks about the backlinks ranking signal in general and why it might be less important in the future for SEO specialists rather than penalties.

John Mueller’s Response On Backlinks Ranking Signal

Mueller stated, “Well, it’s something where I imagine, over time, the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web.” Perhaps Mueller is saying that since penalties aren’t important now, they won’t be in the future when backlinks are less valuable to obtain. Muller continued to say, “And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It’s like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it?… But my guess is over time, it won’t be such a big factor as sometimes it is today. I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit.”

Backlinks are definitely decreasing in importance in regard to SEO ranking factors. They do still serve a purpose for Google and for SEO ranking, they are just not as heavily weighted as a ranking factor as they were 10 years ago. It seems like this is a trend that will continue for some time, although I believe backlinks will always serve a purpose.

If you would like to watch the entire Q&A with John, the video can be viewed here.