Google On Why Important Links Might Not That Be Important Or Helpful

Jan 3, 2024 - 7:41 am 7 — by

Google Robot Shiny Links

Google's John Mueller explained why some links that you think are important might not be that important for search ranking purposes. He responded to a question on Reddit asking why an important link is not shown by the third-party link trackers.

The person asked, "I have the most important (parent company) domain linking to the site but it doesn’t show on any trackers and I haven’t seen a noticeable increase in DA or traffic since then. They linked in a blog post and we link them often. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to ask them to do anything specific?"

The obvious answer is that not all link tracking tools pick up all links and that Google does not use DA, a third party metric.

But John added more, he said:

  • PageRank is per page, so a random page on an important domain is still a random page.
  • da is da, and not Google.
  • if it's from your parent company, maybe they have a more persistent page that they could use.
  • no tool that shows links is ever complete.
  • trying to understand how links like this work is fine, but don't over focus on links.

Forum discussion at Reddit.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search On PDFs: Conversion, Links, HTML, Ranking, Limits, Crawling...

Oct 13, 2026 - 3:27 pm
Google

Gemini 4 Argon In Google Search Via AI Mode

Oct 13, 2026 - 12:13 pm
Bing SEO

Topics Portfolio In Bing Webmaster Tools AI Reports

Oct 13, 2026 - 11:59 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: October 13, 2026

Oct 13, 2026 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Showing Sites Old Domain Fourth Months After Domain Move?

Oct 13, 2026 - 7:43 am
Google Ads

Google May Show Pharmaceutical & Drug Ads In AI Mode & AI Overviews

Oct 13, 2026 - 7:41 am
Previous Story: Big Google Search Console Feature Request List For 2024