There have been a lot of strong reactions to this Search Engine Journal article covering a comment from Google’s Gary Illyes, saying that ‘we need very few links to rank pages’ and that ‘over the years we’ve made links less important’.

Beyond SEJ’s simplistic headline summary that ‘Google confirms links are not that important’, an obvious first caveat is that Illyes’ statement was about pages, rather than sites.

Google doesn’t need to see too many links to articles from the BBC to rank them for relevant keyword terms. However, sites like this already have millions of backlinks and unquestionable authority on a site level.

So while the reaction to the headline and article has been strong, we should absolutely not be neglecting links when it comes to digital PR, even if they aren’t as important as they used to be.

Are links less important?

In short, yes, links are less important as indicators of authority and trustworthiness than they used to be. This is something which we have seen over the years from various Google updates.

With the prevalence of link building, it was only natural that there would be increased measures put in place to gauge what actually indicates authority, and it’s not just who can gather the greatest number of backlinks.

But this means that it hasn’t been an overnight slide into irrelevance for links as a ranking factor, and a lot of the chatter around these comments misses that point.

We’ve known for a while that link KPIs are an outdated and flawed way to measure campaigns and we should be steering clients away from using links as a key benchmark for digital PR activity.

At the same time, nofollow links and brand mentions are gaining importance as ranking factors. Google has identified them as more natural ways to refer to a brand or website than a backlink profile of exclusively follow links.

The end result of this for digital PRs is that, along with not having backlinks as a key target for campaigns, it will become more important for campaigns to be highly relevant to brands. They need to highlight expertise, and there needs to be a clear reason why the brand is producing it. This will likely lead to a rise in data-led campaigns, particularly with first-party data that inherently highlights a company’s expertise.

Why backlinks are still a part of digital PR

Just because links are less important than they used to be doesn’t mean that they are completely obsolete. As we’ve covered, sites that can rank pages with few links will be those that already have deep backlink profiles.

Links are still an indicator of trust and authority, and the value of obtaining links from high quality national or niche websites hasn’t disappeared.

Earning backlinks should still be a part of PR strategy, with practices such as citation monitoring offering ways to boost authority and traffic through links.

The key thing here is that brands need to earn backlinks rather than buying them, but again this has been developing for years, and any brand engaging in buying links is leaving itself open to suffer from algorithm updates.

What we may well see moving forward is that citations and brand mentions are also included in campaign goals, as the awareness that they bring and increased algorithmic importance as an indicator of quality. With this, we might see clients less likely to immediately ask ‘can we not get a link?’ every time you show them coverage that doesn’t include a follow link.

We can dream of that, at least.