Will Backlinks Become Less Important In The Future?
Do you have the backlink blues? This can occur when you have followed the rules, produced great content and yet you find your competitors having much better performance on the search engine. A quick check will often reveal they have tons of backlinks albeit a quantity of them appear suspect.
Did you ever wonder why Google put so much weight on backlinks? The thinking behind this is simply that it is supposedly an indicator of the value of the content based on how many high ranking sites are pointing links at your page.
So what’s the big problem with this? Well for one thing it’s too easy to cheat. One can simply buy backlinks from other sites in an effort to fool the search engine and this creates an unfair playing field for those who choose to follow the rules. Another problem is that backlinks are not necessarily indicative that a given landing page will provide the specific information a user is looking for.
Last but not least another substantial problem with this approach is that older content can have an advantage over brand new and fresh content. Even though newly published content is superior in quality, older and lesser quality content has had more time to build up the quantity of backlinks.
If you’re still reading you can find solace in some comments made by Matt Cutts. When Matt was asked about backlinks being less important in the future he responded by saying, “backlinks will be in play for a few more years to come but eventually they will in fact become less important.” His explanation of this is that in the future, search engines will seek to put more emphasis on how well the page content matches the needs of the searcher and less emphasis on backlinks.
For this to become a reality algorithms will have to become more advanced in their ability to understand actual language. It will also become important to have a way to understand the content author as well as their level of expertise on a given subject.
Take a minute to watch the video below and then join us in looking forward to the day that content has a fair chance to compete on the basis of quality instead of backlinks.