The other day, Laura Hampton posted on Twitter a link to an interview citing Bing saying that over time Bing will value links less in their search ranking algorithms. So I followed up with Bing who told me it is not true – links are still an important signal and will remain to be so for the foreseeable future.

But having James Murray, EMEA Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft Bing say this is interesting:

Bing told me this is not the case, saying “there are a variety of factors that come into play with ranking signals, links being one of them.”

Yandex removed links from their algorithms for specific queries, only to bring them back later. Google said they tested dropping links from their algorithms some time ago and it lead to pretty poor search results.

I can’t see Bing doing this either.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier – I am currently offline today.