Google’s John Mueller says the total number of backlinks on a website has nothing to do with search algorithms.
One good link from a relevant website is more effective than millions of poor quality links.
This was stated by Mueller in a Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 19th.
The site owner sends Mueller the following questions: “What matters most? How many unique referring backlink domains or total number of backlinks?”
Mueller, who is sometimes known for his vague answers, couldn’t be more clear in explaining how none of these factors mattered to Google.
Read his full answer in the section below.
Google’s John Mueller on backlinks
Mueller advises site owners not to focus on the total number of links pointing to their site or the total number of unique referring domains.
He explains that Google doesn’t value links that way.
“I don’t think our system differentiates in that way. From my point of view, we tend not to look at the total number of links to your site or the total number of domain links to your website. because we look at links in very different ways.”
Regarding links, what matters to Google is how relevant each link is to the website it links to.
This is how Google determines how much weight an individual link deserves. The total number is “no problem at all”.
In theory, your site could build millions of links across millions of domains, and Google could end up ignoring them.
“We’re trying to understand what’s relevant to the website and how much weight these individual links should have. The total number of links doesn’t matter at all. Millions if you want. You can create millions of links to your website, or you can ignore them all.”
Mueller says a single link from a relevant source can send a strong signal to Google about how the page should be treated.
He gives a fictitious example of a page linked from a major news site. Google considers it an important page, even if it’s one of the only links.
“Or maybe there is one very good link from one website, which is why this website should be treated as relevant because of that one link. It’s a very important sign, I don’t know, maybe it’s like the home page of a big news site, so the totals are essentially completely irrelevant.”
For Google, quality is more important than quantity.
Listen to Mueller’s full response in the video below.
For more information about this Hangouts, see the article below.
