Are links still important in SEO?

This is one of those very important questions that everyone will have an opinion on. Ultimately there is only one important opinion and that is the one from Google itself.

Matt was asked whether there was a version of Google that was publicly available that gave results excluding the influence of links. What a great question. Matt replied that there wasn’t one publicly available but that, of course, Google has one that they looked at and that;

‘… excluding backlink relevancy resulted in ‘much worse’ search quality.’

It couldn’t be much clearer; not worse but much worse. In spite of all the spam, which tends to get most of the focus in the discussion, links improve search quality. I think we can assume that, generally, links are more good than bad and they are still and will remain for the foreseeable future very important.