Duy Nguyen of Google’s Search Quality team stated during the Google office hours video that “backlinks as a signal has a lot less significant impact than when Google Search first started many years ago.” Duy stated this at around the 6:08 mark of the video.

This should come as no surprise to the majority of you. We have recently reported that Google stated that links would likely be less significant shortly. Even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago. The weighting of links is much less than eight years ago. And that trend is continuing. In the past, Google said links were not the main Google ranking factor.

The question that led to this answer came from Adrea, who was asking, “why does Google keep using backlinks as a ranking factor if link-building campaigns are not allowed? Why can’t Google find other ranking factors that can’t be easily manipulated, like backlinks?”

Duy replied, “First, backlinks as a signal have a lot less significant impact than when Google Search first started many years ago. We have hundreds of robust ranking signals to ensure that we can rank the most relevant and useful results for all queries.”

Then Duy commented that the efforts of these people are ineffective and waste time and money. He stated, “link building campaigns are essentially link spam according to our spam policy. We have many algorithms capable of detecting unnatural links at scale and nullifying them. This means that spammers or SEOs spending money on links have no way of knowing if the money they spent on link building is worth it since it’s likely that they’re just wasting money building all these spammy links. Our systems already nullified them as soon as we see them.”

Here’s the embedded video:

Duy was also asked a question similar to this in the video at around 19:39 point, and Duy provided a similar response. This is the question and its answer:

“I’m new to SEO, and I see many websites or videos suggest buying backlinks. Are backlinks as powerful, or should I focus on maximizing the quality of my site?”

People always look for methods or shortcuts to manipulate rankings, search or even spend money to make their websites appear more credible in search results. Link spam is one illustration of these techniques. The use of links has diminished in most cases compared to twenty years ago. We also introduced a variety of algorithms to block spammy links; therefore, you should avoid spending money on linking to spammy sites. The money you spend is crucial in creating a website that offers a fantastic user experience and valuable information.