Google Has No Preference Between Text Links & Image Links
Google has adapted to handle all sorts of different organic links, and doesn’t see text links as better than image links.
External Links Are More Critical for Initial Content Discovery & Crawling
External links are useful for helping Google find and crawl new websites, but they become less important to Google once it has already discovered the site in question.
Forum Links Don’t Usually Have SEO Benefit But Can Drive Referral Traffic
Links within forum comments are usually nofollowed so they won’t have any benefit from an SEO perspective, however, engaging with relevant users in forums is useful for community building and driving referral traffic to your site.
Google Takes The Disavow File into Account Immediately
When re-crawling the URLs specified in the disavow file, Google will immediately drop these. However, they will still appear in the Links Report seen in Google Search Console.
Google Ignores Links from User-generated Content
Google is able to identify and ignore links pointing to other websites within user-generated or auto-generated content.
Google Ignores Links from User-generated Content
Google is able to identify and ignore links pointing to other websites within user-generated or auto-generated content.
External Links to Other Pages May Help Google Understand the Context of a Page and Improve User Experience
Including external links to other pages can help Google to understand the context of a page a little bit, and may improve the user experience, but external links don’t impact rankings directly.
Google Doesn’t Select Homepages as the Most Important Page by Default
Google doesn’t automatically decide that the homepage is the most important page on a site. This is an effect often seen because Google’s signals indicate the homepage is important e.g. through internal linking and backlinks.
Links Can be Ignored Algorithmically and Manually by Google
Links can be ignored algorithmically and manually by the Web Spam Team when they are taking manual action on a site to block the site from passing PageRank.