In 2023, that is no longer the case, according to Gary Illyes, an analyst on the Google Search team, speaking at Pubcon Pro in Austin last week.

Why we care. To be clear, links still matter. Illyes said as much. Nobody is saying otherwise. But it’s also important to understand that the Google Search of today is not the same as it was in 2014 or the early 2000s when PageRank was everything and every link was a “vote.” Technology has advanced and machine learning (e.g., BERT, MUM), natural language understanding and other relevance signals now have more importance in Google’s algorithm.

Dig deeper: AMA with Google’s Gary Illyes: 15 quick SEO takeaways

What Illyes said. Illyes was asked whether links are still among the three most important Google Search ranking factors. He does not.

• “I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don’t agree it’s in the top three. It hasn’t been for some time.”

Illyes also said, “it is possible to rank without links.” Although it very much sounded like an edge case, he mentioned one case in which a website had zero links (internal or external) but had such fantastic content that it was ranking number one consistently. Google was only able to discover it via the website’s sitemap.

Illyes delivered a similar message earlier this year during a keynote at a Pubcon event in February, noting you can do fine in many verticals without links:

• “Links are important, but not as important as people think.”

Not the first to downgrade links. Duy Nguyen from Google’s search quality team also said links have a less significant impact for ranking in November during a Google SEO Office Hours:

• “First, backlinks as a signal has a lot less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago. We have robust ranking signals, hundreds of them, to make sure that we are able to rank the most relevant and useful results for all queries.”

In a Search Off the Record podcast episode, Google’s John Mueller said he believes that links will be not as important of a ranking factor for Google:

“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’t figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web. 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.”

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Whether your clients are struggling with negative or non-existent reviews, or already have a solid online reputation, this guide from GatherUp will help you approach, generate, manage, and make the most of your clients’ online customer reviews over the long term.

Download it and learn how to:

• Implement an effective review management strategy
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• Use reviews to improve SEO and boost client credibility

The post The marketing’s agency’s guide to customer reviews appeared first on Digital Academy - Lucknow.

This is the third broad core algorithm update of 2023. the first core update of 2023 was the March 2023 core update, which started rolling out on March 15 and was completed on March 28. The second core update of 2023 was the August 2023 core update, which started rolling out on August 22 and was completed on September 7.

The announcement. Google announced this on X and updated its search status page:

• “Released the October 2023 core update. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.”

What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past:

• There aren’t specific actions to take to recover. A negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages.
• Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update.
• Google said you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change would be after another core update.

Why we care. Whenever Google updates its search ranking algorithms, your site can do better or worse in the search results. Knowing when Google makes these updates gives us something to point to understand if it was something you changed on your website or something Google changed with its ranking algorithm. Today, we know Google has released a core ranking update, so keep an eye on your analytics and rankings over the next couple of weeks.

Although with the spam update rolling out at the same time, it might be hard to isolate which update or updates impacted your site.

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