Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important

What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024? At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important. The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter LessIn 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. The documentation previously said:“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.