Google officially changes its position on the importance of links in ranking – and Erik Baeumlisberger from The Search Guru noticed it first.

On June 18th, Erik discovered a big change at Google. In the past, Google had advised webmasters that increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages could improve the ranking of their site. The screen shot below shows precisely how the text read as of January 27, 2013.

Effective May 27, 2013, however, the text was changed to read: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”

Although the amount of text that was changed is small (replacing the last 12 words of one sentence), this is a major shift in Google’s position – one that we’ve seen coming for a while, but is now finally official.

Search Engine Land gives a shout out to Erik.

Once Erik shared his find on social media channels, the news quickly spread.

How are you going to tweak your linking and social media strategies, if you haven’t already? Leave a comment below.