In today’s video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam reaffirms the significance of backlinks.
The video is in response to the following question:
Does the big G have a version of the search engine that totally excludes any backlink relevancy? I’m wondering what search would look like and am curious to try it out.
While Cutts says there is no public version of the search engine that excludes backlink relevancy, he confirms his team has run internal tests to see what would happen.
According to Cutts, excluding backlink relevancy resulted in “much worse” search quality.
“It turns out backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part are still a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results,” says Cutts.
Source - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-backlink-relevancy-big-win-terms-search-quality-184753
