11/11/2024
Written by Albert Hu
Today, Google dominates the search engine market. It captures an estimated global market share of around 92% as of early 2024. This overwhelming lead far surpasses competitors like Bing (around 3%) and Yahoo (approximately 1%), with search engines such as Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo capturing smaller percentages. Thus, if you are looking for ways for your business to thrive, Google presents huge opportunities to reach your ideal target customers.
So, it begs the question - What is the most important factor in ranking on Google?
Answer: High Authority Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your site from other websites. However, not all backlinks are made equal. The most important backlinks that help your website to rank are high-authority sites. Authority is a metric that Google uses to determine how credible and trustworthy a website is.
As an analogy, think back to when you were in high school and how there are different social groups. One group happens to be the cool and popular kids. Everyone wants to be in that group. So, how do you become cool and popular? You get one of the cool kids to vouch that you are also cool.
So, a high authority site is like the cool kid in high school. Getting a backlink from one raises the social credit of your website.
However, what happens if you get a backlink from a spammy website? The opposite happens. If you join the awkward outcasts nobody wants to be part of in high school, you will be unpopular. So, getting a backlink from spammy websites can hurt your rankings.
This backlink strategy was what helped Google become the best search engine in the market for people to find good answers to their queries and rise to dominance during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In the late 1990s, most search engines relied heavily on keyword matching within a webpage to determine relevance. This often led to manipulation through "keyword stuffing," where pages would rank highly by cramming in keywords, often resulting in low-quality, irrelevant results. Page and Brin’s backlink approach countered this manipulation by prioritizing links from reputable websites, thus favoring higher-quality content that users found useful. Pages with numerous links from credible sources were considered more trustworthy, and Google’s PageRank algorithm would rank them higher as a result.
This focus on backlinks as a quality metric quickly helped Google deliver far more relevant and useful search results compared to its competitors, such as AltaVista, Yahoo, and Lycos, which could not filter out low-quality, keyword-stuffed pages as effectively. Google launched to the public in 1998 and soon earned a reputation for providing superior search results.
While PageRank and backlink analysis were foundational, Google didn’t stop there. Over the years, Google continually innovated by expanding its algorithm beyond PageRank to include over 200 ranking factors.
Some of the ranking factors include a website's mobile responsiveness, speed performance, high-value content, and user behavior on a webpage.
However, Google has altered its algorithms many times, and website owners have complained their traffic dropped significantly after each alteration. Despite this, the most important ranking factor is still backlinks. Google's priority over high-authority backlinks makes the search engine hard to manipulate and also allows it to return useful search results.
Backlinks remain an important ranking factor, though Google now combines them with other complex signals like content quality, user experience, page load times, and mobile optimization. Competitors like Bing have tried to replicate Google’s success, but Google’s early adoption of PageRank and its subsequent innovations built a strong foundation that competitors struggled to match.
Thus, the emphasis on backlinks as a credibility signal allowed Google to stand out early on, building its brand on reliable, high-quality search results. Over time, it’s the combination of this foundational strategy with ongoing innovation and improvements in user experience that has allowed Google to dominate the market.
