Video transcription
Today’s question comes from Leah in New York,who asks, “Google changed the search engine market in the ’90s by evaluating a website’s backlinks instead of just the content, like others did.
Updates like Panda and Penguin show a shift in importance towards content.Will backlinks lose their importance?”
Well, I think backlinks still have many, many years left in them.
But inevitably, what we’re trying to do is figure out how an expert user would say,this particular page matched their information needs.And sometimes backlinks matter for that.
It’s helpful to find out what the reputation of the site or a page is.
But for the most part, people care about the quality of the content on that particular page,the one that they landed on.
So I think over time, backlinks will become a little less important.
If we could really be able to tell Danny Sullivan wrote this article or Vanessa Fox wrote this article,something like that, that would help us understand, OK.,This is something where it’s an expert, an expert in this particular field.
And then even if we don’t know who actually wrote something,Google is getting better and better at understanding actual language.
So one of the big areas that we’re investing in for the coming few months is trying to figure out how to do more like a Star Trek computer, so conversational search.
The sort of search where you can talk to a machine.
And it will be able to understand, so you’re not just using keywords.
And in order to understand what someone is saying, like how tall is Justin Bieber and then when was he born, to be able to know what that’s referring to.
He is referring to Justin Bieber.
That’s the sort of thing where, in order to do that well,we need to understand natural language more.
And so I think as we get better at understanding who wrote something, and what the real meaning of that content is, inevitably over time,there will be a little less emphasis on links.
But I would expect that for the next few years,we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and of sites.
Quick Answer: Ideally yes, as Google better understands content.