Are Backlinks Still Important for SEO?

Yes, backlinks still matter to Google, but they aren’t the dominant factor many SEOs assume. Google says PageRank remains part of its core ranking systems, while its own representatives have said that links are overestimated and that their weight has been falling.

Both statements are true at once, so the useful question isn’t “do links matter?” but “how much, compared with what, and what’s actually confirmed?”

What Does Google’s Own Documentation Say About Links?

Google’s documentation says links help it discover pages and understand what they’re about, that PageRank is still a core system, and that links are only one signal among many.

PageRank is still a core system

Google’s guide to ranking systems, last updated on 10 December 2025, says Google has systems that understand how pages link to each other to work out what pages are about and which might be most helpful. It says PageRank has evolved a lot since Google launched, but continues to be part of its core ranking systems.

The same guide lists Penguin, a system designed to combat link spam, as retired. Google says it was announced in 2012 and integrated into its core ranking systems in 2016.

One signal among many

The SEO Starter Guide makes the balance explicit. PageRank uses links and is one of Google’s fundamental algorithms, but Google says there’s much more to Search than links and that PageRank is one signal of many.

The guide also says the vast majority of new pages Google finds each day are found through links. That’s a statement about discovery rather than ranking.

Discovery is a separate job

Google’s guide to how Search works says some pages are discovered when Google extracts a link from a known page to a new one. Crawling is a different question from ranking, and a page can be found through a link and still not rank.

What Have Google Representatives Said About Links Declining?

Google representatives have said, in public, that link weight is falling or overestimated. Only one of these comments is backed by a Google-published transcript; the others are reports.

Who	When	Where	What was said	Source status
John Mueller	Published 3 November 2022	Search Off the Record, recorded live at brightonSEO	He imagined the weight on links would drop off a little over time, while saying Google will always care about links for finding pages.	Google’s own transcript
Gary Illyes	21 September 2023	PubCon Austin Q&A	Links are important but overestimated, not a top three factor for some time, and content is the top factor.	Attendee posts, compiled by Search Engine Roundtable
John Mueller	Reported 1 April 2024	Reddit thread	Over-focusing on links will often waste time spent on things that don’t improve a site.	Quoted by Search Engine Journal
Gary Illyes	April 2024	SerpConf, Bulgaria	An attendee reported “we need very few links to rank pages”.	Wording unconfirmed; see below

What the transcript says

The Mueller remark comes from Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, in an episode recorded live at brightonSEO and published on 3 November 2022. Asked about Google’s criteria for penalising backlinks, he said he imagined that over time the weight on links would drop off a little as Google gets better at understanding how content fits within the whole web.

He added that links will always be something Google cares about, because it has to find pages somehow. A little later he said his guess was that links won’t be such a big factor as they sometimes are today, and that this was already changing quite a bit.

What the PubCon reports say

Search Engine Roundtable’s account of the 2023 PubCon Q&A is built from attendees’ posts on 21 September 2023. One attendee’s notes have Illyes saying links are important but people overestimate them, and that he doesn’t agree they’re in the top three and that it hasn’t been for some time.

The same notes have him naming content as the top factor. Search Engine Roundtable also quotes a Search Engine Land write-up saying he cited a page with no internal or external links that ranked first for a Porsche query, found by Google through a sitemap.

No recording is public as far as we could find, so treat the wording as reported.

What the April 2024 reports can and can’t support

Search Engine Journal reported on 22 April 2024 that a SerpConf attendee, Patrick Stox, posted that Illyes said “we need very few links to rank pages”. Illyes replied on 19 April that he shouldn’t have said that.

That confirms he said something, but not the exact wording. We’d treat it as unconfirmed.

The Mueller Reddit comment is quoted at length by Search Engine Journal, which links to the thread. We couldn’t load Reddit, so it stays a reported quote: Mueller recommended not focusing on the absolute count of links, and said over-focusing on them will often waste time.

Wondering how your link profile compares with competitors? Talk to us about link building and we’ll start with an honest look at what you have.

So Are Backlinks Still Important for SEO?

Yes, as one input among many, and one that’s easier to waste time on than to benefit from.

If PageRank is still core, links still do something. If Google’s engineers say the weight has fallen, a link is worth less than it was and less than many link sellers claim.

Nobody outside Google knows the exact weight, and it will differ by query. Google hasn’t published it, and no one can responsibly give you a figure.

What a 2024 leak does and doesn’t add

In May 2024, Mike King published an analysis of leaked Google API documentation, which Google confirmed was authentic while cautioning against assumptions drawn from incomplete information. King wrote that the documentation shows Google stores a great deal of data about the link graph, but that he’d seen no evidence to refute the claims that links count for less.

That’s one SEO’s reading of documentation that doesn’t include the scoring functions. It shows Google measures links in detail, and it doesn’t say how much they weigh.

What that means for your priorities

If your pages are thin, slow to load or hard to crawl, fixing those will often beat a link campaign. If the pages are strong and competitors still outrank you, links are a sensible next place to look.

Test the change where you can, so you aren’t crediting links for a ranking move that came from something else. At Utterly Digital we test ranking factors in single-variable experiments for exactly that reason.

What Makes a Backlink Valuable?

Google doesn’t publish a definition of a good link, so what follows is practitioner judgement, with the parts Google does document marked as such.

Qualities practitioners look for (our view)

• Editorial. A publisher chose to link because the page was useful, not because they were paid.
• Relevant. The linking page covers the same subject as yours.
• Descriptive. Google’s link best practices say anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant, and that links must be crawlable <a href> elements.
• Likely to send readers. A link people click is a real endorsement, whatever its attributes.

A warning about third-party scores

Some link-checking tools score pages on proprietary metrics. Those are third-party estimates, and Google hasn’t published a link quality score you can look up.

Link types and where Google stands

This table summarises what Google documents. The “usually worth it” column is our view.

Link type	Google’s position	Our view
Earned editorial link	Normal; the kind of link PageRank was built on	Usually worth it
Paid link, qualified with sponsored or nofollow	Acceptable	Worth it for traffic, not rankings
Paid link, not qualified	Link spam	Avoid
Directory or bookmark site link, low quality	Listed as link spam	Avoid
Forum comment with optimised link	Listed as link spam	Avoid
Optimised anchors in press releases or guest posts on other sites	Listed as link spam	Avoid
Internal link	Recommended for every page you care about	Always plan it

Do Nofollow Links Count?

Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints, and its current guidance says links marked with them will generally not be followed.

What Google announced in 2019

Google’s 2019 announcement introduced the sponsored and ugc values and said all three attributes are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude. Before that, a nofollow link wasn’t counted as a signal at all.

Google gave its reason for the change: links contain useful information, such as how the words within them describe the page they point to, and looking at all links helps it spot unnatural linking patterns.

What the current guidance says

Google’s current guidance on qualifying outbound links says to mark paid placements with sponsored, and that nofollow is still an acceptable way to flag them. It adds that links marked this way will generally not be followed.

So don’t count on a nofollow link for ranking, and don’t dismiss it either. A relevant nofollow link on a respected publication can still send readers.

What Links Should You Avoid?

Avoid any link whose main purpose is to manipulate rankings: paid links without qualification, link exchanges, automated links and low-value pages made to host links.

What the spam policies list

Google’s spam policies list exchanging money or goods for links, sending a product in exchange for a link, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation, forum comments with optimised links, and widely distributed footer or template links. They also list low-quality directory links.

Google adds that buying and selling links is a normal part of the web for advertising and sponsorship, and isn’t a violation when the link carries rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored”.

How Google deals with link spam

On 14 December 2022 Google announced a link spam update using SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system, which it said can now detect both sites buying links and sites used to pass outgoing links. It said ranking could change as spammy links are neutralised and any credit passed by those links is lost.

That’s the difference between a penalty and a nullified link. The second means the link simply stops helping.

What a manual action looks like

Google’s manual actions report covers “unnatural links to your site”, described as a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive or manipulative links. If you receive one, Google’s steps are to download your links from Search Console, ask site owners to remove the bad ones, disavow those you can’t get removed, and then request a review.

What Is the Disavow Tool and When Should You Use It?

It’s a Search Console tool that asks Google to ignore specific links to your site. Google says most sites don’t need it.

According to Google’s disavow guidance, you should use it only if you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links, and those links have caused or are likely to cause a manual action. Google says it can usually assess which links to trust without help.

Cautions from Google

It calls the tool advanced and warns that misuse can harm your performance in search. Its first recommendation is to remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as you can.

Practical details

The tool doesn’t support Domain properties, a new upload replaces your existing list, and Google says it can take a few weeks to incorporate a list. Disavowed links continue to show in the Links report.

Do Backlinks Matter for AI Search?

There’s no confirmed answer. Google says there are no extra requirements for its AI features, and how other AI assistants pick sources hasn’t been published.

What Google says

Google’s AI features guidance says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no additional requirements or special optimisations needed. It lists making content findable through internal links among those fundamentals.

What the correlation data shows

In a study of 75,000 brands, published on 26 May 2025, Ahrefs found that branded web mentions correlated with brand visibility in AI Overviews at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. Ahrefs stresses that correlation does not equal causation.

It suggests that being mentioned widely may matter as much as being linked, which supports earning coverage rather than counting links. It doesn’t show that links have stopped mattering, or that mentions cause AI citations.

Related: How Do You Get Your Brand Cited by ChatGPT?

Do Internal Links Matter as Much as Backlinks?

They do a different job. Internal links are the part of the link graph you fully control, and Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

What Google says about internal links

Google’s link best practices say paying attention to internal anchor text helps both people and Google make sense of your site and find its pages. They also say there’s no magical ideal number of links on a page, and that if you think it’s too many, it probably is.

Where internal links help most

Google finds pages through links from pages it already knows, so a page nothing links to is harder to discover. Planning those links before you write is the point of a topical map.

Related: What Is a Topical Map in SEO?

How Do You Earn Backlinks Without Breaking the Rules?

Create something worth citing, tell the people who cover your subject, and let them choose whether to link. Everything else is a shortcut that Google’s policies are written against.

Approaches that fit Google’s policies

• Original data or research that journalists and other publishers can cite.
• Expert comment on live stories from a named specialist.
• Genuinely useful tools and guides that people reference.
• Reclaiming mentions and fixing broken links, which is housekeeping rather than manipulation.

Why digital PR is the usual route

Digital PR packages those approaches around a story a journalist can use. Our guide to what digital PR is covers how it differs from link building, and our digital PR service is built around it.

Protect the links you already have

Links you’ve already earned can be lost in a rebuild if old URLs aren’t redirected properly. Related: How Do You Migrate a Website Without Losing Rankings?

How Do You Check Your Own Links?

Start with the Links report in Google Search Console, then add a third-party backlink tool for a wider view.

What the Links report shows

Google’s Links report shows top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text. It isn’t a complete list: Google says it shows a sample of links, tables are capped at 1,000 rows, and it doesn’t specify whether a link is marked as nofollow.

What to look for

Use it to spot patterns rather than to count. A sudden run of odd anchor text, or links from sites in an unrelated language, is worth a closer look.

A steady trickle of links from publications in your own sector is what healthy usually looks like. That’s our judgement, not a Google definition.

How many backlinks do you need?

No published number applies. Compare the number of referring domains pointing at the pages that rank for your target query with your own, using a backlink tool, and ask whether the gap is plausible to close.

If the top pages have few links and yours is the weaker page, links probably aren’t your problem, and an SEO audit will show what is. A structured internal linking plan often is the cheaper fix.

Want links that earn their place? See our link building service.