An entire industry sells links, and Google’s own description of what links do has been getting quieter for a decade. Both of those things are true at once, and the gap between them is where most small business SEO budgets go to die. This piece is the pillar for the rest of the cluster: what a link demonstrably does inside Google’s systems, how much weight the evidence supports, and which of the claims you will hear are simply not in the documentation.
What a link does, in Google’s own words
Google’s Link best practices documentation opens with a single sentence that covers the whole mechanism: “Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.” Two jobs, discovery and relevance, and they are worth separating because they fail in different ways.
Discovery is mechanical and has a hard technical requirement. Google states that it can generally only crawl a link if it is an anchor element with an href attribute, and that the href must resolve to something resembling a real URI. A navigation item built from a span with a click handler, or an href of javascript:goTo(), is documented as not reliably parsed. If your site menu is built that way, the problem is not your link building.
Relevance is the part everyone means when they say “link juice.” Google’s guide to ranking systems still lists link analysis and PageRank as a live component, describing PageRank as “one of our core ranking systems used when Google first launched” and adding that “how PageRank works has evolved a lot since then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems.” So the mechanism is real and current. What has changed is its share of the answer.
How much weight links actually carry
In 2023, at Pubcon Pro in Austin, Google’s Gary Illyes said links are not a top three ranking factor and had not been for some time, adding that people overestimate their importance. That is a Google employee on stage, not a competitor’s guess, and it is the single most useful sentence for calibrating a link budget. Links matter. They are not the lever.
The enforcement side has also gone quiet in a way that is easy to misread. Penguin, the system built specifically to combat link spam, was announced in 2012 and, per Google’s own retired systems list, was integrated into core ranking in 2016. That means link assessment is continuous rather than a periodic punishment event you can wait out. The December 2022 link spam update went further: Google said SpamBrain now detects both sites buying links and sites used to pass outgoing links, and that “ranking may change as spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost.”
2016
Year the Penguin link spam system was folded into core ranking
Not top 3
Where Google’s Gary Illyes placed links among ranking factors, 2023
<a href>
The only link format Google says it can reliably crawl
Sources: Google guide to Search ranking systems; Gary Illyes at Pubcon Pro 2023, reported by Search Engine Land; Google Link best practices documentation.
Read the neutralization language carefully, because it reframes the whole risk calculation. The common outcome of a bad link campaign is not a dramatic penalty. It is that the links are ignored and the money is gone. That is a worse deal in some ways, because nothing tells you it happened.
Three things a link is not
It is not something you can simply buy
Google’s spam policies define link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings,” and the examples are broader than most people expect. Exchanging money for links is on the list, but so is exchanging goods or services, and so is “sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.” Gifted product with an unqualified link is a policy violation, not a grey area.
It is not a score
Google publishes no site authority number. The third-party metrics the industry runs on are vendor models, useful as a rough sort and nothing more. Google’s own Search Quality Rater Guidelines are unusually direct here: when assessing a site’s reputation, raters are told to look for independent reviews, references, expert recommendations and news articles, and specifically that traffic data from sites like Similarweb does not provide evidence of positive or negative reputation and can be ignored. Human judgement about a source, not a machine-compiled number.
It is not a substitute for the page
Google states that its ranking systems are designed to work at page level, and that “having some good site-wide signals does not mean that all content from a site will always rank highly.” A thin page on a well-linked domain is still a thin page. Links raise the ceiling on what a good page can achieve; they do not create the page.
Where the three link types actually differ
| Link type | What the documentation says | Control |
|---|---|---|
| Backlinks from other sites | Used as a relevancy signal and to discover new pages. Manipulated ones are neutralized, and patterns of them can trigger an “unnatural links” manual action. | None. You can only earn or decline. |
| Internal links | How Google finds most of your pages. Google states that if a site’s pages are properly linked, it can usually discover most of the site without a sitemap. | Total. This is the free win. |
| Outbound links from you | Must be qualified with rel="sponsored", rel="ugc" or rel="nofollow" where they are paid, user-generated, or otherwise untrusted. | Total, and it is your compliance obligation. |
Source: Google Search Central, Link best practices, Spam policies, and Sitemaps documentation.
Key takeaways
- Google documents two jobs for links: finding new pages to crawl, and signalling relevance. Only an anchor element with an href does the first reliably.
- PageRank remains listed as part of Google’s core ranking systems, but a Google employee has publicly said links are not a top three factor.
- Since the December 2022 link spam update, the usual result of manipulative links is neutralization, not punishment. The money is wasted quietly.
- Gifting a product in exchange for a link is explicitly listed as link spam unless the link is qualified.
- Google publishes no authority score, and its rater guidelines tell evaluators to ignore machine-compiled traffic metrics as reputation evidence.
Explore the links series
Sources
- Link best practices for Google, Google Search Central
- A guide to Google Search ranking systems, Google Search Central
- Spam policies for Google web search, Google Search Central
- December 2022 link spam update releasing for Google Search, Google Search Central Blog (2022)
- Links are not a top 3 Google Search ranking factor, says Gary Illyes, Search Engine Land (2023)
- Link Building
- SEO
- Getting Started
Written by
Daniel Okafor
SEO & Organic Growth Lead
Daniel Okafor leads SEO and organic growth at ThisCom, helping small and medium businesses earn authority through technical SEO, content, and high-quality links.
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