Do Links Still Matter for Real Estate SEO?

Like clockwork, the SEO industry debates the importance of links every 6-8 months. That alone might give you the answer to the question I ask in the title of this blog post. (Would we continually debate something that's not important?)

But the answer to that is more nuanced. So let's talk about the role that links play in SEO for real estate.

About six months ago, Gary Illyes, a well-known member of Google's search team who speaks at a lot of industry conferences, told one such gathering that links are "not a top 3 ranking factor" and haven't been "for some time."

Just this week, he was speaking at another conference and again downplayed the importance of links.

Here are my thoughts on this:

First, we've learned in the SEO industry that almost everything Google says should be examined closely. Google shares a lot of great information for small business owners, SEOs, webmasters, etc. But they also steer you in the wrong direction when it suits their business goals. (For example, Google publicly denied for more than a decade that it didn't use clicks as a ranking factor. Then a former Google search engineer just testified in court that they do/did.)

So it's possible that Illyes is just feeding us all another red herring.

Second, I want you to think about and understand the bigger picture. Let me paraphrase something I shared on LinkedIn:

The whole discussion is silly. It implies that Google has a master list of ranking factors that apply across the board.

Search is more complicated than that. Google is more sophisticated than that. So I think it's pretty disingenuous for Gary to even make statements implying that there's some master list of ranking factors.

The ranking factors that apply more to one search may apply less to another search. For some search queries, links may not matter much at all ... but for others, they can be everything. A real estate agent in New York City is probably gonna need more links to rank for basic keywords than a real estate agent in Bakersfield, CA.

I have a chapter on links in my real estate SEO course, and in one video I say this: "[Links] may matter a little less than they did 10 years ago, but I would dare anyone to try to rank for a competitive keyword without inbound links from other sites. It’s really unlikely."

So back to the original question/debate: Do links still matter for real estate SEO? Absolutely. But do they matter the same for every agent? Highly unlikely.