The Value of Links: Why Backlinks Still Matter for SEO

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.”

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

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.

All articles by Daniel Okafor →