What Are Backlinks? A Complete Guide

What Are Backlinks

The question what are backlinks is a question that’s often asked by someone who is either trying to get into the industry or someone who wants to start a business. Backlinks are one of the most important and most relevant elements of a good and SEO-friendly website, but do you know what they are?
In this guide, we will go over all crucial information on what they are, how you can create backlinks, what link building is, and many more so your site can climb up the search engine ladder!

NOTE: This guide will be filled with terminologies that you might not fully understand, but we will do our best to ensure that you get all the relevant information and learn about them!

What Are Backlinks?

The root of all these terms is also the answer to your question. Backlinks or also referred to as “inbound links” by some webmasters, are links that are one-way or incoming from website A to website B. Oftentimes, when another website links to your website, that is considered a backlink.
It basically “links back” to your website because of something relevant you shared or posted.

Major search engines, including Google, look at “votes” for the backlink for a particular page. Therefore, the more backlinks a page has, the more the search engine thinks it’s extremely relevant, the higher the ranking of that website will be.

Link vs. Backlink: How Are They Different?

Links and backlinks are commonly interchanged by people thinking that they’re the same. When, in reality, they’re not 100% identical.

It may sound difficult, but a backlink is a type of link out of the many different classifications and kinds of links there are. To make it simpler, a link is just a string of text, usually alphanumeric characters that redirects you to a certain part of a website or webpage.

There is what we call external links and internal links.

External links are links in a webpage that are not from within the same website. For instance, if website ABC has a link but the link is from website DEF, that’s an external link.

In that same scenario, website DEF has a backlink from website ABC since they used your website to display and show a link in theirs.

Regardless of what the goal is, the idea of linking is to provide more value to the reader or the user. Google and other search engines look at this as more relevant and therefore, content that has relevant and essential links appear to be better and higher in the rankings.

Backlinks Tell Google That Your Links Have Value

Backlinks Tell Google That Your Links Have Value

The reason why many websites and content creators compete with backlinks is the fact that it’s evident how important it is in the search engine results page (SERP). So, when you look at it, the more backlinks your website has, the more Google thinks how relevant and how great your contents are.

They, therefore, play a big and crucial role in the determination of whether your content will rank or not.

Why Are Backlinks a Big Deal?

The importance of backlinks goes as far as when Google opened its doors to the public. When it was launched in 1998, it made use of an algorithm that ranked the results in the SERP. Their algorithm mainly played link popularity, which simply means that the more links on a webpage, the higher it will rank.

PageRank, the title or name of the algorithm, was the first-ever-made algorithm. Eventually, programmers found it to be unethical and unfair as having the most backlinks didn’t actually bring the value to a particular webpage.

Therefore, they added a feat to it – the authority of links. Domain Authority or more commonly referred to as DA, is a ranking score that has been developed by Moz. It’s something that helps predict how likely a webpage or website will rank in SERPs.

So, why are they important? Well, backlinks are one of the strongest elements of SEO today and for you to have a clearer and better understanding of it, here are some of the things they help out the most:

Better and Higher Ranking

As we mentioned above, Google and other search engines look at backlinks as a type of weight on whether a website or webpage is relevant or not. They use them as confidence votes that speak for themselves.

Ahrefs made this study and found that the amount of backlinks from unique websites strongly relate with organic search traffic. Meaning, the more backlinks on a site or page, the more traffic it got!

Easier Discoverability

In case you didn’t know, search engines actually revisit pages that are popular more often than those that are not. When they find that your website is continuously getting backlinks, they’ll put you atop the SERPs because they know how valuable your content is.

NOTE: Search engines regularly visit sites and pages. They have “crawlers” or spiders lurking from one page to another checking whether your links are valid and if they’re valuable or not.

More Traffic

Imagine having 200 backlinks. In layman’s terms, that’s 200 different websites displaying or offering your website to their readers and users. What this does is increase the chances of your website getting more users or traffic.

These are the primary points of importance that backlinks have. You can think of it as the more backlinks your website or webpage has, the more chances of it getting heavier traffic and therefore, you’ll be able to present yourself in front of more people.

Identifying a Great Backlink

Not all backlinks are the same – not all are equal. There are good and bad backlinks – good ones help improve your site’s rankings, while bad ones burn it to pieces.

They’re From Authoritative Websites

Of course, backlinks are good if the websites that link back to you are authoritative and trusted. Who would want to believe a website that has shady information and non-valuable content?

Try to picture this – a McDonald’s wants to do business with you offering you low-quality budget and funds. Would you choose a non-popular food chain that has received tons of reports over McDonald’s?

The Linking To You Should Be Related to Your Niche or Site

Just because they have a ton of links doesn’t mean they’re better – in today’s time, the niche is as important as backlinks, too. In fact, relevance is the new way of ranking!

When you try to identify a good backlink from a bad one, it’s not always by the number of links that website has but the content and the niche or the industry they’re moving in, too.

The Link is Unique and Has Never Linked to You Before

Links from the same website has a diminishing value – let that sink in. There are about 10,000+ websites built per day, it’s no magic to have at least one of them link to you once a week, right?

Remember, getting 100 links from 100 different websites is a LOT BETTER than getting 1,000 links from just a single one.

They Must Be “Do-Follow” Links

Search engines, including our old friend Google, of course, almost try to ignore links that have the “no-follow” tag on them. In short, these no-follow links won’t actually have search engine rankings in algorithms.

To cite a few examples of several sources that “tend” to have no-follow links, they are:

  • Blog comments
  • Paid advertisements
  • Press releases
  • Similar journals

The Anchor Text Should Include the Target Keyword

In case you’re not familiar with it, anchor text is the section within a link that is clickable. To cite an example, for example, you get a backlink to your site that with the anchor text “make money online.” From there, Google sees that anchored text and it will think that the website must be about making money online.

You want your links to have anchor text that includes the target keyword that you have. But, don’t overdo it because it can be tagged as spammy and controversial.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the practice of gettingdifferent types of links from other places over the internet towards YOUR website.

Overall, the goal of link building is to increase the number and quality of inbound links to a website in order to enhance its ranking in several search engines (including Google).

Link building is done and completed in many different ways, but the best one is by creating valuable and relevant content – content that other website owners and websites will want and choose to link to.Then reaching out to those websites to request that they include a link to your site.

NOTE: Link building can be a complex and time-consuming process, but it is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) and can help to drive more traffic to your website.

The Fundamentals of Link Building

Link building has been and is still one of Search Engine Optimization or SEO as they help a website gain more trust, traction, and tenacity because of the value that it offers. In case you’re not sure of what link building is, it is the act of building, pasting, and including hyperlinks of text going to a particular website from a website.

This improves the visibility of a website in search engines as websites that have more links are considered better, more important, and more valuable than those that only have a few.

So, we present to you the basics or the fundamentals of link building and how you can use it to your website’s advantage!

Finding High-Quality Links

There are a few different ways of how you can find good and high-quality links and not a lot of people actually pay a lot of attention to this because they think of it as inessential. Luckily, backlinko shared a few of the best practices they do in finding the best and highest quality of links.

Here are a few points to note so that you get the better sense of whether a link is good or bad.

Page Authority

The authority of the page linking to you matters in determining whether they are a great link or not. Since PageRank is one of Google’s oldest algorithms (they still use it, by the way), you can check the authority of the page linking to you to see if it is healthy or not.

Site Authority

The authority of the site is also a big determining factor of health. Not a lot of websites take a closer look at their authority, but it does play a crucial role in your ranking.

In case you weren’t aware, site authority is the ability of a website to rank relevant content in organic search results. The better and more authoritative the site that links to you, the more value it brings in.

Site Relevance

The relevance of the site that links to you also matters. When we say relevance, we mean the topic or the value that is close or within your niche. So, if for example your blog is about freelancing, how to make money online, and how you can earn passive income, even if you get a link from a popular Women’s Health Magazine, it wouldn’t really count.

A previous Google Engineer said that PageRank is really what counted BEFORE. Today, though, relevance is a lot of a bigger factor than just a number of links on a given webpage.

Positioning

The positioning of content is another big player in the ranking sector. According to SE Round Table, links that are kept and stashed in sidebars, footers, and unvisited locations are not as valuable as you think – they are even close to being useless versus finding a single link in the body of the content.

The point is, don’t waste your time and energy on non-valuable links that are not shown in the content body.

Anchor Text

As a reminder, anchor text are text that are visible with a link. It’s also one of the most important categories of whether a link is rich and healthy or not, but it doesn’t always mean “the more the merrier.”

Be careful, because Google also intensifies its security measures and considered keyword-rich anchored texts as spammy. So, avoid building links with anchor texts that are just your keywords.

It’s a different scenario, though, when you get keyword-rich anchor text from a legitimate source and it’s not that many.

These are some of the different ways on how you can check the link quality. Remember, in SEO, the better the link, the higher the ranking – the further up you go in the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. That only means one thing – the more people will see your website!

Checking Backlinks

When you’re now sure about your links, the next step would be to check the backlinks. You want to do this because you want to find out whether the backlinks linking to your website are healthy or not. For one, we discussed the importance of good backlinks above and another, it gives you a more and better position in front of Google’s eyes.

There are actually a few different ways on how you can check your backlinks:

Using the Google Search Console

Using The Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is this robust machine that can give you all the information you need about websites that have been indexed in Google. Here’s a simple step-by-step process on how to use it properly:

  1. Sign into your Google account.
  2. Once done, select Links on the left-hand sidebar.
  3. When it responds, it will show you three (3) reports:
    1. Top Linking Text or the most frequently used anchors when other sites link back to you;
    2. Top Linked Pages or the most linked pages on your site; and
    3. Top Linking Sites or the sites that have the most backlinks to your website.

You can use this tool to help you identify useful metrics within your website that you can adjust, modify, and improve for your ranking to improve with it.

Using a Third-Party Checker

Aside from Google’s Search Console, other websites offer backlink checker tools, too. You can find a ton of them, and in our honest opinion, Ahref’s Free Backlink Checker is the best and most efficient one to use.

Using it is simple, you just have to enter the URL or the domain name of the site you want to check and select Check Backlinks. From there, you will see the total number of backlinks (including unique websites) plus the 100 backlinks, too.

Ahref’s data is unbearably amazing as it does not only show you basic information. Moreover, it also gives you:

  • Anchor and Backlinking or the surrounding link text and the anchor;
  • URL Rating or the strength of the linking URL or webpage;
  • Referring Page or the exact page linking to the target;
  • Domain Rating or the overall strength that links to your website; and
  • Traffic or the estimated monthly organic searches that links to your page

The Best Backlink Building Strategies

Now that we’ve gone over the basics, let us now go to the fun and advanced part – the processes or methods of building highly-effective backlinks to your website.

SEM Rush, one of the best tools and businesses in the industry, listed a couple of the best strategies that they have for building backlinks. As per them, the best ones are:

Outreach Strategy

The outreach strategy is one of the best and most popular strategies in link building because it lets other webmasters and website owners know that your website is up and existent. For instance, it’s like saying to websites that “hey, my website is here and it has value about what you’re talking about – you can use it as a link!”

There are tons of ways on how you can do it but the best one would be by using the Link Building Tool by SEMRush. Here’s the step-by-step way on how to properly use it!

  1. Open the tool and select CREATE PROJECT.
  2. From there, give your project a name and enter your domain.
  3. Once done, confirm by clicking or selectin CREATE PROJECT
  4. Next, add your keywords one by one and make sure that they are relevant to what you’re trying to build links to.
  5. After you’re done adding, click You will see it at the bottom part of the pop-up display message.
  6. Then, add the URLS or the websites to the “competitors”field and then click on START LINK BUILDING.
  7. The tool will collect and analyze data and information and it will display the top prospects you can reach out to.
  8. You can choose to reject a prospect and remove it or you can keep track of the progress of current existing ones and reach out to them.

The tool is easy to use and it is manageable!

Becoming A Legitimate Source

The next best thing or strategy to do is to become a legitimate source. You see, today, there are a ton of bloggers, journalists, and reporters who are looking for sources for them to publish. Right now, the most popular of these services is HARO, which is short for Help A Reporter Out.

What this service does is connect people who need sources to the people who want to expose those sources.

So, what you have to do is to create an account in HARO and start your journey there! Make sure you tick and select all possible niches to have and you will see your influence rank higher and better.

Broken Link Building

Broken Link Building

Last but most definitely not least is the classic and old way of building links – by building broken ones. If you’re not aware, broken link building is the process of finding external links on other websites that are broken or not working, then, reaching out to the web owner recommending that your website or your link is better.

You will find many different tools to help you find broken links in the industry or the niche that you are in, so, don’t worry about it! In case you can’t find one, you can make use of SEM Rush’s backlink analytic tool to look for broken pages and links on the websites of competitors.

These are three (3) of the fundamental ways of building backlinks. They might not seem a lot for you now, but practicing them is actually like preparing for a new set of modern and advanced techniques of backlink building.

Master these three (3) and you’ll be able to get high-quality backlinks every single time you need it.

We do hope that we’ve gone through all the relevant pieces of information you need in starting to learn about backlinks. As you may have seen and noticed, there are a lot of ways on how you can build backlinks – you just need to know what to do and where to go!

By finishing this guide, you will not be lost any more on what the next steps are in building your backlinks!

FAQs

If, in any case you feel that you still need to learn more about backlinks or if you’re just starting, we’ve gathered a few of the most frequently asked questions for you!

Are Backlinks Important For SEO?

Yes, backlinks are an important factor or element for SEO as they show search engines how relevant and how great the domain authority of a site is. The more backlinks a website has, the more it will appear relevant and essential in the SERPs.

Is Facebook a Backlink?

No, Facebook is not a backlink as it is a website. However, links on the platform that links to a particular website is considered a “backlink” to that particular website. So, for instance, if you have a blog and one of your pages have been posted and linked on Facebook, it’s considered a backlink.

Can You List 3 Types of Backlinks?

There are a multitude of backlink types in the market today. There are more than 14 types of backlinks but the most relevant ones are:

  • Free-Tool Backlinks
  • Editorial Backlinks
  • Guest Blogging Backlinks
  • Webinar Backlinks
  • Business Profile Backlinks
  • Comment Backlinks

Can Backlinks Hurt Your Site?

Although they’re mostly used to improve and develop your website, they can also be downright bad to it. Sometimes, even if you have a multitude of backlinks to your site, search engines can see this as spam, especially if they’re not put correctly. When it’s marked as spam, search engines can penalize you for it or worse, it can get deindexed.

Final Verdict

So, do you now know the answer to the question “what are backlinks?” Can you, on your own, identify what a backlink is? Backlinks are important and essential in the world of marketing because it is like a double-edged sword – but in a positive way.

It is downright imperative to know and understand the skeletal structure of backlinks as it can help improve your website’s overall ranking and authority.