Matt Cutts on the importance of backlinks

Matt Cutts posted another video recently to answer a question brought to him concerning the existence of backlinks. The question was along the lines of “is there an available search engine for the public that totally excludes backlinks?”

Google have their own private system that lets them see what search quality would be like without backlinks, whilst the public don’t have this luxury. However, Cutts was quick to demonstrate the importance of backlinks after Google had run their own tests to see what excluding backlinks would do to search.

Cutts was quick to assure his viewers that backlinks were still “a really, really big win” despite the amount of spam being reported in the past. He also explained that when his team had run the tests that excluded backlinks, the results provided “much worse” search quality.

So what is it that makes backlinks so important to a website and how do they improve search quality?

The answer is reasonably straightforward really. If a website decides to ignore links entirely, it will almost certainly not rank effectively at all.

Google are constantly searching for ways to improve Google as a search engine and in order to do so they need to make sure they provide pages that are as relevant as possible to the search term.

Backlinks are a vital piece in the puzzle and Google won’t be able to determine a relevant search result without using backlinks.

It seems then that, despite the “amount of noise” as Cutts put it, we should always rely on backlinks to help our SEO campaign and they quite simply can’t be ignored.

Artemis internet Marketing know all about the importance of backlinks and how they have an effect on your SEO campaign. Why not get in touch with us for a free consultation and we can help benefit your site through a detailed analysis of your SEO strategies.