The same unsourced sentence spreads across three subreddits with no citation. Here's what Illyes and Mueller said, and it's not that.
The same opening line shows up, word for word, in r/SEO, r/Agentic_SEO, and r/seogrowth: "How are you guys building backlinks after Google officially said random and low quality backlinks are useless?" No link, no quote, no name attached to who at Google supposedly said it. It's just there, treated as settled fact, spreading by copy-paste. Nobody in any of the threads seems to ask where it came from.
What Google's people said
There's a real thread of Google statements behind the confusion, just not the one being quoted. In September 2023, Gary Illyes told a PubCon Austin audience that links aren't even in the top three ranking factors anymore. In April 2024, at a conference in Bulgaria, he went further: "We need very few links to rank pages... Over the years we've made links less important," a line confirmed by his own follow-up tweet, "I shouldn't have said that... I definitely shouldn't have said that." That same March, Google quietly edited its documentation, changing "Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages" to drop the word "important." John Mueller added his own version around the same time, advising site owners that "over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don't make your website better overall."
Line those up and the actual claim is about quantity, not quality: Google has spent several years telling people to stop counting links and stop treating link volume as a growth lever. That's a meaningfully different statement from "low-quality backlinks are useless," and neither Illyes nor Mueller made the second one in any of these quotes.
The other half of the confusion: what about the spammy links already pointing at you?
There's a second, older Google statement that gets mixed into this, and it's about a different question entirely. In a 2018 Webmaster Hangout, a site owner asked Mueller what to do about the spammy, possibly-penalized sites that had accumulated backlinks to their site over the years. Mueller's answer: mostly don't worry about it. "That's something where if a website has been around for a long time then it has links from all kinds of crazy places... these are things we see on the web all the time." He carved out one exception: someone deliberately buying links at scale on your behalf, which he said is worth paying attention to.
That's a statement about links you didn't build and don't control showing up on your site, telling you Google generally discounts them without your having to do anything. It's not a statement about whether building low-quality links yourself, on purpose, is a viable strategy. Those are opposite questions, and the "useless" soundbite seems to have absorbed both without distinguishing them.
Where "useless" undersells what happens
Here's the part the flattened version gets backwards. Google's own spam policies don't describe manipulative link building as harmless or a waste of effort, they describe it as something that "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all." That's a real, negative consequence attached to sites caught running link schemes, buying links at scale, or using automated programs to generate them, not the shrug that "useless" implies. A useless action is neutral: it costs you time and nothing happens. Google's own language describes a downside.
The genuinely accurate version, stitched together from what these different people said in different contexts, sounds less quotable than the Reddit version: Google has downweighted link quantity as a ranking factor over several years, discounts most stray low-authority links pointing at your site without you needing to act, and can actively demote sites it catches running deliberate link schemes. That's three separate, true things. "Google officially said low-quality backlinks are useless" isn't any one of them, it's a compression that lost the parts that made the original statements accurate.
Why the compressed version spreads
A single soundbite travels better than three qualified statements from three different years. It's the same pattern behind ignoring the white-hat-versus-black-hat framing that already gets debunked on this blog elsewhere: a nuanced, contextual position from Google gets sanded down into a clean rule because a clean rule is easier to repeat in a forum comment than a paragraph with three caveats. The same flattening shows up in the disavow-everything experiment covered here recently, where Mueller's actual, hedged "SEOs often overestimate links" gets read by some as "links don't matter at all," which isn't what he said either.
Where this differs from what's already on this blog
This isn't a new claim about Google's position on links, it's a trace-the-source piece on a specific viral sentence that's been copy-pasted across multiple subreddits with zero attribution attached to it. The mechanism is the same one this blog has flagged before: a real, hedged Google statement gets rounded off into something more absolute the further it travels from the original quote.
A directory listing doesn't carry any of this ambiguity, since inclusion is either there or it isn't, with no soundbite to distort in either direction.
