SEO News You Can Use: The Total Number of Backlinks on Your Site Doesn’t Matter For SEO

How many backlinks does your website have? If you’re like many other web owners, it’s probably something you track religiously. It’s why you’re doing link-building outreach, writing guest posts, drawing up infographics and producing data-driven content that other sources will hopefully cite. Getting more links has been an SEO tactic since the early days, and link-building efforts have since only gained steam.

So, surely the volume of backlinks your site has amassed over the years has had an impact on your SEO, right? Well, not necessarily. In fact, according to Google’s John Mueller, the total number of backlinks on a website doesn’t matter at all – it’s not even something Google’s search algorithm looks at. Mueller addressed the topic in the latest Search Central SEO office-hours hangout when a viewer asked what was more important: the volume of unique referring backlink domains or the total volume of backlinks.

Mueller did not hold back, giving an uncharacteristically definitive response:

“I don’t think we differentiate like that in our systems. From my point of view, I would tend not to focus on the total number of links to your site, or the total number of domain links to your website, because we look at links in a very different way.”

In the question of quality vs. quantity, the former holds much more value in the link-building world. Just one great link from a high-authority website can be more impactful than thousands – or even millions – of low-quality links. The only thing Google really cares about is how relevant each link is to the website it’s pointing to. Mueller also mentioned that even if a page has only one link from a major news site, that signal would be enough for Google to view it as a quality page.

While this may come as a surprise, it shouldn’t: As Barry Schwartz said in his blog for Search Engine Roundtable, it’s “SEO 101.” High-quality backlinks have always been the ultimate SEO trump card, regardless of all the web owners who continue with practices like irrelevant directory submissions and generic outreach emails in an attempt to get more links. Instead, put that time and effort into producing content people will want to link to – easier said than done, yes, but infinitely more valuable to Google and its user experience-focused future.

Source: seoblog.com