Back In November, during a live session at Brighton SEO, John Mueller of Google predicted something interesting about the future of backlinks.
John was joined by Lizzi Sassman, another Googler, and guest Myriam Jessier.
Together, the hosts answer a question about how Google penalizes backlinks, which asks:
“As an SEO, we are interested in backlinks. However, actively working on backlinks often becomes a gray area in terms of link schemes. What are Google’s main criteria for penalizing backlinks?”
According to the group, Group typically discourages any forms of unnatural link building. They didn’t want to say too much on the subject because knowing too much would encourage grey hat behavior from marketers.
It was suggested by John Mueller
Mueller says:
“Well, it’s something where I imagine, over time, the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web.”
Mueller continues:
“And to some extent, links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow. It’s like how do you find a page on the web without some reference to it?”
But my guess is over time, it won’t be such a big factor as sometimes it is today. I think already, that’s something that’s been changing quite a bit.”