Google Changes Ranking Advice, Says Build Quality Sites Not Links

Google has quietly updated the rankings article within the Google Webmaster Help documentation. The change is to keep Google consistent with their general change in messaging that content is what webmasters should focus on, not links.

Previously, the article had a line that read:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

We’ve bolded the key part, which was changed on May 27th to say:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.

You can see the old version on The Wayback Machine; the change was spotted yesterday by Erik Baeumlisberger.

The change is consistent with a message that Google’s been pushing recently, to focus people less on link building and more on building quality content. The head of Google’s web spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, spoke about this in a video to publishers on April 29:

He again repeated his belief earlier this month that focusing on link building too much is a mistake by some SEOs:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.