Google’s Matt Cutts: Over Time Backlinks Will Become Less Important

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a video that backlinks, over time, will become a little less important. Matt did say that backlinks in the Google ranking algorithm still have many years left in them.
Matt explained that Google is focusing a lot now on working on ways to determine if a web page is meets the expectations of an expert user. They do this currently by looking at the links to the page, the reputation of the site and pages and the quality of the content on that particular page.

Google Inorganic Links For "DoFollow" Links

Google's Eric Kuan from the Google spam team posted a response to one webmaster who said a competitor is spamming them with bad links and asked Google to provide examples of some bad links.

Eric did so in the Google Webmaster Help thread by showing a few links.

I always enjoy sharing these public examples because it gives those who have never received an unnatural link warning an idea of what links to stay away from. In this case, the webmaster is persistent about those links not being acquired by himself but a competitor trying to sabotage him.

Google Index Status Count Drop After Update Line

Google's John Mueller posted an excellent example of a case of where a webmaster is nervous about a report in Google Webmaster Tools, when in reality, all is good.

He posted this on Google+ and shared a screen shot by Jodi Bennett. The screen shot, as you will see below, shows a complete drop off of indexed pages after the update line.

Google Test Lab For Experimenting With Google's Rankings

Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz, announced on his personal blog a new thing he is playing with he named IMEC, aka Internet Marketing Experimental Collective.

The goal is to increase the number of people experimenting with Google's search results, so they can give more validity to the experiments they run. Rand said, "The goal is to assemble a group of marketers who care about producing high-quality, consistent, repeatable experiments in search engines and on social media to learn more about how these platforms work."

Here is an example of an experiment one would run: