Are links no longer important to Google?

Someone professional on a foreign platform published an article discussing whether links are still important to Google when it comes to search engine rankings.

Google's Gary Illyes said that Google needs very few links and more evidence that links are more important than at any other time in SEO history.

Apparently Google's Gary Illyse told a search conference in Bulgaria: "We need very few links to rank pages ...... Over the years, we've made links less important."

He also tweeted to confirm that he did say this, although he mentioned that he shouldn't have. You can read the thread on Twitter/X. Interestingly, one commenter said it was completely untrue.

You shouldn't have said that because it's clearly false. Today, in the sea of AI content, links are as important as ever. You can't determine quality or expert content other than relevance, as the SERPs have proven.

Roger goes on to write:

In 2023, Google's Gary Illyes shared at Austin PubCon that links weren't even in the top 3 ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 core algorithm update, Google updated its spam policy document to downplay the importance of links for ranking.

In April, Google's John Mueller stated that

Mueller explained:

"There are more important things for websites to do now, and focusing too much on links usually leads to you wasting time doing things that won't make your site better overall"

This is an interesting read because someone will get a dozen emails a day from agencies asking to buy links and they could be wasting their clients' money.

Background on Ranking Links

Links were discovered in the late 1990s as a great signal for search engines to verify the authority of a website, and then Google soon discovered that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about the content of a web page.