Google’s John Mueller said: twitter “Links are definitely not the most important SEO factor.” This came shortly after he told me to forget everything I’ve read in the past about link juice.
Here are the tweets:
Links are definitely not the most important SEO factor.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 31, 2020
John preceded this statement by saying, “If everything you read uses the term ‘link juice’, it’s almost certainly wrong and you should focus on the basics instead of worrying about ‘link juice’.” “You have to build a website, monitor server logs, learn how search works, understand your users. You have to build a better site,” he says.
Again, he says, “links are definitely not the most important SEO factor.”
I think most SEOs would agree that content trumps links as a more important ranking factor. But again, most SEOs consider links to be one of the most important SEO ranking factors.
I asked John to clarify that while links are still very important, they are not the single most important factor Google uses.
forum discussion at twitter.
Update from John:
When it comes to search crawling, indexing and ranking, we use many factors.
Also divisors, exponents, and other functions.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 31, 2020