John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, made a prediction about the future of backlinks during a live talk at Brighton SEO.
During a live recording of the Search Off The Record podcast, the famous Google’s Search Advocate answered several questions alongside with Google employee Lizzi Sassman and guest Myriam Jessier.
Mueller, Sassman, and Jessier, all together, were asked about how Google penalizes backlinks.
“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?”
After some wordplay between the hosts, Mueller deviated his answer slightly from the original question, which is a normal thing for Google representatives, because they are often careful when answering questions concerning this kind of topics.
Rather than talking about backlinks penalties, Mueller discussed the backlinks ranking signal in general and why it may become less important to SEO experts in the future.
According to Mueller, Google’s algorithm won’t have to rely so much on backlinks.
“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.”
Perhaps Mueller is trying to say that penalties aren’t worth worrying about because backlinks won’t be as critical in the future.
Mueller continued also by saying:
“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.”
Find the full discussion at the 13:17 mark in Google’s latest Search Off The Record podcast: