Google’s Gary Illyes recently made a statement at a search marketing conference, confirming that Google now requires very few links for ranking purposes. This revelation adds to the mounting evidence suggesting that links are becoming less crucial in the realm of SEO.

Links have long been considered a vital signal for search engines to determine the authority of a website. The discovery of the significance of links dates back to the late 1990s, with anchor text emerging as a way to provide semantic signals about the content of a webpage.

An influential research paper titled ‘Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment’ by Jon M. Kleinberg, published in 1998, shed light on the role of links in filtering search results for quality and authoritativeness. Kleinberg’s work emphasized the use of links as an objective metric for determining authority.

Further research, including Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,’ explored how anchor text could be utilized to gauge the subjective opinion of relevance from internet users. This approach essentially leveraged the collective opinions expressed through the link structure of webpages.

In light of these developments, Gary Illyes’ recent comments at the conference in Bulgaria indicated that Google now places less emphasis on the quantity of links for ranking pages. Illyes suggested that over the years, Google has devalued the importance of links in its ranking algorithm.