If Google becomes better at understanding search intent and providing more relevant results, links, the ranking factor par excellence, consequently lose weight. I have personally noticed the loss of weight of links , even quality ones, for a few years now. Of course, they are still very useful for pushing up a page in a short time and are still "the most important ranking signal", but be careful of the fact that the Serps are increasingly dynamic and even that push given by links could be temporary.
Otherwise, we would not be able to explain why one of the most why choose our service authoritative and trusted sites in terms of link profile has lost half of its organic traffic in 3 months.
3. Long form lose weight
Another consequence – easily understandable – of these changes is that even long form (or pillar articles) are losing importance.
The main feature of long forms is to develop a single primary keyword, usually with medium traffic volume and competition, going into more detail with dedicated paragraphs, the long tail keywords. related to it. This creates a sort of text that for breadth and optimization (some would say "over optimization) satisfies the general SEO rules for the optimization of a text, allowing not only to position the long tail keywords, but, most of the time, also the primary one.
A site like Aranzulla and, in general, many strong and historic information portals, have based their SEO success on this strategy.
But I notice that Google is changing the rules of the game in this area too . . More and more immediacy in accessing the answer, seems to be Google's mantra now.
So, given the same on-site optimizations, if I have a long form that, among its 2000 words, also tells me how to merge two Facebook pages and an article, of only 300 words, that immediately and only explains to me how to merge two Facebook pages, then it may be that now it will be more likely to see the second one at the top of the Serp.
Those who work in SEO today are called to an important challenge: to develop a skill that will have more and more priority. Becoming an excellent analyst. In order to remain competitive, it will be necessary to be able to observe and analyze changes, understand the Serp and changes in the answers given to queries and be quick in adapting their contents/sites to an increasingly dynamic search engine.