Google says the variety of hyperlinks isn’t a helpful metric

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the number of links is not a useful metric for SEO purposes. He also said that by the time you calculate all of your links that number has probably changed – so it’s not a good use of your time.

John wrote that “there is no way to measure the absolute number of external links on a site.” He added that once a site has more than a handful of links, it is “theoretically impossible to count these external links.” The number of links for large sites is constantly changing.

John then said “don’t focus on the number of links, it’s not a useful metric.”

Here are these tweets:

There is no way to measure the absolute number of external links on a site – it is theoretically impossible if a site has more than a handful of links. Don’t focus on the number of links, it’s not a useful metric.

– 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 15, 2021

In this case, links are definitely about quality over quantity. In the old SEO days, quantity was pretty important, but that changed quickly in the early days of Google SEO tactics.

Forum discussion at Twitter.