Originally Posted by wankawonk

Backlinks will always be important. you can't rank w/o them

But, a lot of experts are seeing traffic and on-site metrics as more important:

https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/

Direct traffic is #1 ranking factor according to semrush. IMO direct traffic is too easy to manipulate to be a factor, but google can measure brand searches on google that result in an engaged session as a hard-to-manipulate proxy for direct traffic.

Also I don't think google cares about metrics on paid traffic. They only care about metrics on the traffic they send you--if they see good bouncerate/ToS on SE clicks they'll rank your site higher. So, manipulating your overall bouncerate/ToS with paid traffic seems pointless based on what I believe. The only reason paid traffic helps SEO is because it increases brand searches. Just what I believe, could be wrong.

I like feeder traffic because it increases my brand searches and I've seen that google likes when your domain generates brand searches. But I still don't understand how so many sites have no SE traffic and still buy tons of feeder traffic. They must have a secret sauce to monetize it.