Google's September 2023 update shifted how it measures authority beyond backlinks alone. Now brand signals matter: search volume for your brand name, how well Google knows you, and overall notability. Backlinks still count, but optimizing only those won't fix a weak site anymore.
More backlinks you have, more authority it shows to Google and more it tends to be like, oh yeah, this guy have a lot of authority because a lot of, you know, other sites are linking to them. That's a lot of backlinks and that means he's trustworthy. So that was really the most important stuff I will say in the past, in the last, like, I don't know, 20 years or something like that. And since 2023, it started to change a little bit. So I will say that a new branch of authority tend to show up, which is like the brand search and brand volume and brand, you know, knowledge. So how much people know about your brand, how much people come to your website by searching your brand and everything. That was like something that started to show up, I will say in 2023, end of September 2023, when it was like the helpful content update in SEO, we started to see a kind of, so backlinks was not like, it was not ineffective, you know, it was not like not effective anymore. It was not like you cannot just overdo backlinks like we used to do. And then, and you know, it will not patch all the weakness that you have. So now you need a bit of brand notability as well, more than only backlinks, more than, you know, only one-off stuff. So you need to be more complete and more 360, I would say, than before.
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Keith Gillispie: Why Most New Investors Fail & How to Avoid the Common Traps #250 | SaaS District
