---
title: "Google Has No Idea If Your Page Is Good"
date: 2026-03-23T09:38
author: Julien Reszka
description: "After 25 years, Google still can't judge quality, so it defers to the crowd and makes you beg for backlinks instead of just writing something good."
keywords: ["Google", "SEO", "backlinks", "PageRank", "search quality", "productivity", "content distribution"]
canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/google-has-no-idea-if-your-page-is-good/
---

# Google Has No Idea If Your Page Is Good

After 25 years, Google still can't judge quality, so it defers to the crowd and makes you beg for backlinks instead of just writing something good.

Google can tell you:

- a page exists
- how fast it loads
- how many other sites point to it

but it still cannot tell you whether the page is genuinely useful, so it keeps deferring to the crowd, which means the web's most linked pages win regardless of quality, and if you actually made something good you now have to spend your energy chasing backlinks instead of improving the work. A clear example is Wikipedia: it ranks first for almost everything not because it is always the most accurate or deepest source, but because half the internet links to it. Any specialist who writes a better page on the same topic will sit on page four until someone notices them and links back. The part you control is the work itself and where you take it first: publish for a specific audience that already trusts you, send it directly to people who would genuinely find it useful, and let the backlinks follow from that, rather than spending the same energy on SEO for an algorithm that cannot tell the difference anyway.

---

**Actionable insight:** Send your next piece directly to ten people who would genuinely find it useful. That is more valuable than any SEO optimisation and costs the same amount of time.

## Key figure

**27.6%** — Clicks captured by the top Google result; page two gets less than 1%

*Source: Backlinko*

## Myth vs reality

**Myth:** Better content ranks higher on Google

**Reality:** Google ranks by backlinks, not quality. The most linked page wins regardless of accuracy or depth.

*Source: Brin & Page, PageRank patent, 1998*