Do Backlinks Really Affect SEO?

So far, most webmasters think that Backlinks are the backbone of the Website SEO strategy. Having quality backlinks that are relevant to your blog niche is a big advantage, but do backlinks really have an effect on SEO?

On this occasion, Appac Media will share John Mueller’s hangout highlights which prove that even though backlinks also have a role in SEO, they are not the main factor in getting good rankings on the Google search engine.

John Mueller is a Trend analysis webmaster who works for Google. In the Google+ hangout video, he shares an example of a website without backlinks that ranks well on Google. Here is a video clip of John Mueller’s hangout at GooglePlex with two of his colleagues.

Backlinks are not the main determining factor for ranking.

John Mueller responded by saying “Google uses many factors other than backlinks to rank a website”. He told me that he has a friend in Zurich, who maintains a new website, which consists of more than 300 pages, none of his website pages have a backlink, but the website is well indexed and has high traffic from search engines.

Mueller said, Not one website has ever provided a backlink to his friend’s website. He only submitted a sitemap and had an rss feed.

The website will remain indexed and have a good ranking without having to have backlinks, so backlinks are not a major factor that must be put forward, there are many other factors that Google takes into account in ranking a website, Mueller emphasized.

Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer at Google a year ago also said that Google would remove backlinks from Google’s website ranking algorithm. Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, has also removed backlinks from website ranking determinants.

Conclusion:Backlinks are still one of the factors determining the ranking of a website, but not the main factor, as webmasters have been saying so far. So, in the end everything returns to content, the king. Happy blogging.