How much do backlinks really matter these days?

It depends on the query. Some queries show a >0.60 correlation with page and/or domain links. Some queries show a negative correlation!

CTR, bounce rate, social shares, and all that stuff together are factors in some queries, but we're nowhere near the point where they will define rankings. Here's an example about the challenges of that.

There's no shortage of information on the internet and in literature about Holocaust denialism, and there was even a recent big-budget movie about it, but if you search "did the holocaust happen," you get a random forum post from several years ago filled with falsehoods and ramblings. The point here isn't to bash Google, but that search is hard. Bad shit happens a lot. There's one query I target where, every now and then, the first page will be entirely from one site. Google doesn't like that either, that's a failure of the engine.

Now take that obvious failure with an obvious issue that could obviously be solved by paying more attention to links and content and the knowledge graph, the sort of stuff Google has had for years... and start thinking how badly the algo can botch stuff like CTR, bounce rate, sharing, etc. They have enough problems just sorting out links and content.

validseo said:

Backlinks... the #1 ranking factor of all time. Nothing has changed.

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Invested 800€ this year in links to conclude this and disprove the Google BS..

Links is 90% - the only challenge is how to filter the links. Bad links hurt you a lot(not anymore, to be honest), good links help you a lot. That's the issue: people buy bad links, get hurt and say "links don't matter"...wrong correlation.

Backlinks do matter, but there were some experiments on building a search engine that excludes backlinks. Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) once said that Google doesn’t have such a version for public use, there were some internal ‘experiments’ along these lines, but when they did so, the quality search engine results looked much worse. So yes, quality and relevance of the links still matter and will remain matter in closest future. But who knows for how long

Backlinks are still a huge ranking factor. But think over time, the quality of the links became more important. Back in the days you could rank by just having a large quantity.

Google themselves recently said the three big ranking factors are Rankbrain, content and links.

ON Page for these things, we all know where backlinks are excluded

Now a days backlinks are important. Links are what gives your site authority in the eyes of Google. Backlinks are never going to die, but the way you create and procure them will always change and evolve. The best standards of procuring backlinks is not to go out and ask for them! You have to instead provide meaningful and useful content on your site and wait for backlinks to come to you. Only then will these backlinks be truly beneficial, because they will be on pages with content similar to yours and a website that is similar to yours.

I would say that backlink is more of long term investment (very long term to see results - And subjected to changes by Google update easily). Risk is too high compared to the potential reward. It makes better sense to pay for adword to get immediate ranking in terms of ROI.

There are much better ways to generate traffic and see CONVERSION these days then waiting for results from link building. This explains why there are so many SEO sellers on BHW. As it make sense to take immediate profit as a seller then to wait and see results from link building.

Backlinks are losing power more and more everyday. Backlinks never been less significant than they are today. The real users and social media rule the rankings now

Links will always matter as long as search is still a viable method to send traffic.

Well i have a rare case.

My EMD ranks for my main kw without backlinks at all.

I plan to keep my EMD as reserve domain, but surprisingly, it ranks for its main kw with 500k monthly search in my local. Now it ranks 5.

The competition is mid-high since it has 500k monthly search.

The on page seo, i must say, is quite far from perfect. 100 words with some kw in homepage, and only video and some related tags in every posts (its video site).

When i checked with majestic, 0 backlinks, and yes i never build any link before.

Backlinks are the kings. I have not enough resource to change the content, social media, etc. So the shortcut way is to explore good page/s, old domains.

asap1 said:

Links are becoming less important every year. They are still the most important but Google is looking at other things.

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Link is still core in algorithm and it will be core!

How do you get to page 1 without backlinks? Because things like CTR, Social Signals, etc, might be factors in ranking, but are difficult to get if you are on Page 5 without traffic to analyze that data.

I just watched a video series that comprised over 1000 hrs of testing over the course of a year that basically concluded that links are still the #1 ranking factor. The type of links and other factors regarding them were serious considerations but still and all it had to do with links.