Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web.

Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places.

Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine

That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links.

Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.

Google collects immense of data about people's actual visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative things were You don't need the proxy when you have the record of where people actually visit.

That's very effective for the top results. But if legit sites cannot rank in the first spots they'll get orders of magnitude fewer visits than the scam sites that employ SEO hacks to get the first places.

Like the backlink spammers on the article, which are winning?

but yea "narrative"

Interesting, but this does not seem to match empirical evidence by the likes of Ahrefs, which suggests that links are by far the most important ranking factor.

Go on...

Nice try black hat SEO person :-)

>Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.

I was just talking to my SO about this the other day when we were trying to find an air purifier for allergies. I'm the kind of person that likes to compare products a ton before dropping more than about ~$100 on anything. The way the internet has become in the last 10-15 years has made this increasingly more difficult. You really have to dig to find in-depth unbiased content on anything someone stands to make money from. For every 1 good review there are 100 'top 10 best ranked' blogspam sites..

If you think about it, these are the "money searches". It's crazy they didn't try harder to solve people's needs instead of regurgitating that careless spam.

Heh, I struggle figure out what is a real review and what is a paid for ad. It's sad to the point where I've pretty much given up because of the sheer amount of time it would take to do the research. Instead I opt to go for Amazon's competitors (e.g. Currys and Argos for us in the UK) and pick something there. They're a little more vetted, and less likely to be knock off or something.

I don't think there are incentives for a change. The way it is done now is probably more profitable and the competition is doing exactly the same.