Imagine you’re searching for reliable information online. Just like personal recommendations build trust, search engines rely on backlinks to determine a website’s credibility. But what are backlinks exactly? They are links from other websites that point to yours, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and worth ranking higher. However, not all backlinks hold the same weight—quality and relevance matter. In this guide, we’ll explore what backlinks are, why they’re crucial for SEO, and how you can build high-quality backlinks to improve your website’s visibility.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are hyperlinks from one website to another. They serve as endorsements, signaling to search engines that the linked content is valuable, credible, and relevant. When a webpage links to yours, it essentially vouches for your content, which can improve your site’s authority and search rankings.
What Are Backlinks in SEO?
Backlinks play a vital role in SEO by helping search engines assess a website’s trustworthiness and relevance. Google considers high-quality backlinks as a ranking factor, meaning the more authoritative and relevant sites link to your page, the better your chances of ranking higher in search results.
However, not all backlinks hold the same value. Search engines prioritize high-quality backlinks from authoritative, industry-relevant websites over low-quality or spammy links. Building a strong backlink profile can enhance your site’s domain authority, increase organic traffic, and improve overall visibility.
Why are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are a fundamental part of SEO, acting as a trust signal for search engines. When a reputable website links to your content, it tells search engines that your page is valuable and credible, increasing its chances of ranking higher in search results. Just like citing a trusted source in research adds credibility, backlinks from authoritative websites strengthen your site’s reputation.
As your site earns SEO backlinks, it enhances domain authority, helping search engines recognize it as a reliable source of information. However, search engines prioritize quality over quantity, meaning backlinks from relevant, high-authority sites are more beneficial than those from low-quality or spammy sources.
Key Benefits of Backlinks:
- Higher Search Rankings – More high-quality backlinks signal credibility, improving your site’s ranking on SERPs.
- Increased Brand Awareness – Being featured on authoritative sites exposes your brand to a wider audience.
- Referral Traffic – Backlinks drive direct traffic from other websites, often leading to lower bounce rates and higher engagement.
- Faster Indexing – Search engines discover and crawl new pages more efficiently when they have strong backlinks.
In short, SEO backlinks are essential for improving search rankings, building trust, and driving organic traffic. Prioritizing high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources is key to a successful SEO strategy.
Difference between a link and a backlink
Links, also known as hyperlinks, are clickable elements—typically text or images—that direct users to another section of the same webpage or an entirely different website. They help in website navigation and improve user experience by allowing seamless transitions between web pages.
Backlinks, on the other hand, are links from an external website that point back to your site. They play a crucial role in SEO because search engines view them as votes of confidence. When authoritative websites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your site is a reliable and valuable source of information, improving its ranking potential.
Key Differences Between Hyperlinks and Backlinks:
- Function – Hyperlinks help users navigate within a website or to another site, while backlinks serve as external endorsements that boost a website’s credibility.
- SEO Impact – Hyperlinks enhance user experience, whereas backlinks strengthen SEO by increasing a site’s authority and improving search rankings.
- Direction – Hyperlinks can point to internal or external pages, whereas backlinks always come from external websites linking to yours.
- Effect on Traffic – Backlinks drive organic referral traffic by bringing users from other sites, whereas hyperlinks guide users within a website’s ecosystem.
In summary, while both hyperlinks and backlinks involve linking web pages, backlinks are a vital SEO asset that helps establish website credibility, improve rankings, and increase organic traffic. Prioritizing high-quality backlinks can significantly impact a website’s online visibility and search engine performance.
Types of Backlinks
Nofollow Links
Imagine you’re reading a well-researched blog and decide to check the comments section. You notice several users posting links to their personal websites, some of which seem irrelevant or spammy. This kind of backlink manipulation can harm the credibility and search rankings of the original blog.
To combat such practices, Google introduced the rel=”nofollow” attribute in 2005. This tag tells search engines not to pass any ranking value to the linked page, essentially signaling that the website does not endorse the link. While NoFollow links don’t directly impact SEO rankings, they still provide value by driving referral traffic and diversifying a website’s backlink profile.
Follow Links
Unlike NoFollow links, Follow links are highly valuable for SEO as they pass ranking authority, also known as “link juice,” from one website to another. These backlinks signal to search engines that the linked content is credible and trustworthy, influencing its ranking potential.
The stronger the authority of the linking website, the more SEO value it transfers. When a high-authority website provides a Follow link to your site, it enhances your domain credibility and helps improve your position in search engine results. Search engines use these signals to determine which websites are most relevant for specific keywords, ultimately boosting your rankings.
Editorial Backlinks
Editorial backlinks are among the most valuable links in SEO. These are earned naturally when authoritative websites reference your content as a reliable source within their articles, guides, or research studies. Search engines view such links as strong endorsements, enhancing your website’s credibility and authority. To attract editorial backlinks, focus on creating high-quality, informative, and unique content, such as industry reports, data-driven studies, and expert insights that others find valuable enough to cite.
Guest Post Backlinks
Guest post backlinks are acquired when you contribute an article to another website and include a link to your own site. This strategy helps establish authority, expand your audience, and improve SEO rankings. To maximize their impact, ensure that your guest posts are published on high-authority websites relevant to your niche. The content should be insightful and valuable to readers, with backlinks placed naturally within the content or author bio. When done correctly, guest post backlinks can strengthen your online presence and drive targeted traffic to your website.
Forum & Blog Comment Backlinks
These backlinks are obtained by engaging in discussions on forums and blog comment sections where you provide valuable insights along with a link to your website. While most of these links are NoFollow and do not pass direct SEO value, they can still drive referral traffic and improve brand visibility. To use forum and blog comment backlinks effectively, participate in relevant discussions, offer meaningful contributions, and avoid spammy link-dropping. When used strategically, they can help build relationships within your industry and enhance your website’s authority over time.
Business Profile Backlinks
Business profile backlinks come from creating profiles on business directories, review sites, and social media platforms. These backlinks not only establish your brand’s credibility but also improve local SEO and online visibility. Listing your business on platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, and LinkedIn allows you to add a backlink to your website, helping search engines verify your legitimacy. Consistently updating and optimizing these profiles can further enhance your brand’s reputation and search engine rankings.
Social Media Backlinks
Social media backlinks are links to your website shared on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. While most of these links are NoFollow and do not directly influence SEO rankings, they play a crucial role in increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, and improving content reach. When your content gains traction on social media, it increases the chances of being referenced by other websites, leading to organic backlinks. By actively sharing valuable content and engaging with your audience, you can leverage social media to support your backlink strategy and boost your website’s online presence.
How to Create Backlinks for SEO? (Step-by-Step Guide)
There are several ways to build your own backlinks in SEO or earn them.
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Linkable Asset
Linkable assets are high-quality content pieces designed to attract backlinks naturally. These can include in-depth blog posts, research studies, infographics, and interactive tools that provide unique value. When your content is well-researched and informative, other websites are more likely to reference and link to it.
For example, publishing a detailed industry report with original data can encourage blogs and news sites to cite your research, earning valuable backlinks. To make your content more link-worthy, ensure it is audience-focused, well-structured, and insightful. The more useful your content, the higher the chances of gaining authoritative backlinks that improve your search rankings.
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Building Broken-links
Broken link building is an effective way to earn backlinks while helping website owners fix outdated or broken links. This involves identifying broken links on relevant websites, reaching out to the webmaster, and suggesting your content as a replacement. Since broken links hurt user experience and SEO, many site owners appreciate the assistance and may reward you with a backlink.
For example, if a blog post about SEO strategies links to a now-defunct resource, you can suggest your relevant guide as an alternative. This approach not only gains you backlinks but also builds relationships with authoritative websites in your niche.
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Infographics
Who does not love a good infographic? Search engines surely do! Condensing niche and complicated information into easily digestible graphs makes your site more shareable and backlink-friendly. The odds of generating organic traffic and having news sites backlinking to your site for the simple breakdown of their complex information is high with infographics. However, keep in mind that staying topical and working with the trends will act as a catalyst.
Infographics are also pretty transparent, so if they are full of fluff, you will be patronizing your readers, which is not ideal. A really good infographic ranks high in the shareability quotient based on gathering ample research and data on the topic at hand and translating it into a strikingly visual diagram.
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Guest Posting
Some of the most effective ways to gain backlinks do not involve directly asking for links at all. Guest posting allows you to publish articles on other sites that open the platform to newer audiences and gives you the exposure you need to build your own online foundation.
These relationships with your expanding audience can be leveraged for backlinks over time.
Finding these audiences gives you a map of all the new spaces you can target to make yourself more visible. Find like-minded contributors and follow in their footsteps; it will help you understand where to find information that fits your niche and see what others like you are writing about.
Another factor that search engines look for is whether your website is indexable and crawlable, wherein your website is evaluated on how usefully your information is assimilated to make the user’s experience more enriching.
Building internal links by using shareable anchor text is the key to make navigation so much easier, not to mention a higher probability of getting backlinks.
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Testimonials
Testimonials are very useful for marketers when they want to build brand awareness and sell their products. It simply means using the positive comments and reviews of customers and featuring them on the website. It is meant to capture word of mouth publicity in exchange for links from relevant domains. Relevancy is important here to maintain the authenticity of the testimonial. For example, a software company would not benefit from a testimonial from a flower shop in some other country.
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Link Reclamation
Link reclamation is the process of finding mentions, broken or removed links to your website and updating them with URLs. It is an important part of gaining benefits from a website’s link profile.
It proves to be a useful way for marketers to gain SEO advantages and create backlinks by maintaining a positive user experience and building new links.
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Market Yourself
Every product, no matter how great it is, needs a bit of marketing.
The easiest way to market yourself is to look for keywords associated with your niche and keep up with the current bloggers doing round-ups. These sites are constantly on the lookout for great content, and emailing them with a basic introduction and requesting feedback can help you build a steady base with the right people, which will only prove beneficial over time.
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Competitor Analysis
One of the best ways of finding new backlink prospects is competitor analysis. Websites that link to your competitors are very likely to be relevant for your website. This helps save a lot of time in finding them, as your competitors have already done all the work. You need to find your true competitors to benefit from the competitor analysis, discover their backlinks and borrow the ones with the most potential.
Also Read:- Smart & Easy Tactics To Generate Quality Backlinks
What Makes Good Backlinks?
Many elements make backlinks good. The most important of these elements are:
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Being Organic
Backlinks should be organic, and webmasters have to consciously decide to link to your site because it actually provides value to their readers.
The organic approach is the best way of earning backlinks and sustaining a decent reputation over time. Unfortunately, too many sites have gone down the easy path of fooling search engines into thinking their site is actually more valuable than it is. That kind of content is often treated as spammy and can also be demoted in the search engine results in the worst of situations.
To avoid falling under the spam umbrella, these backlinks must be created with user intent in mind and offer value rather than come off as a promotional piece for your website.
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Including Target Keyword in Anchor text
Anchor text is the visible words and characters of the link. It provides contextual information about the content of the website to the users and search engines.
A keyword-rich anchor text also helps websites rank higher. The link to your website should have anchor text that includes keywords, targeted and descriptive, to accurately describe the page that’s being linked. It should not be over-optimized using repetitive and keyword-rich phrases because Google might link it to black hat strategies.
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Being Reputable
Gone are the days when search engines looked for only keywords. Instead, the algorithm clearly measures your site’s importance on two grounds, the number of backlinks you have acquired and the quality of the sites that have backlinks to you.
When both of these are fulfilled, it automatically boosts your page ranks, and your site is more likely to generate backlinks and organic traffic. This adds to your site’s “link power”, enabling you to pass it on to other pages through hyperlinks. As is the case with most earned backlinks, you do not have much say on how the anchor text pans out, so over-optimization is not important here.
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Rel Attribute
The rel attribute is intended to tell the crawlers about the connection between the linking page and the linked page. An important subset here is the nofollow links, which tell the search engine that the linked page wants to have no association with the linking page. While this is not bad, it’s also not really as likely to pass authority as a sponsored or UGC link, i.e. a link without a nofollow tag. This indicates to search engines that the linked page and linking page have similar content or offerings or are related in some form.
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Placement of the Backlink
Any user would likely click a prominently placed link on any website. Hence, these links possess more authority than those usually placed at portions of websites like the footer section.
If your backlink is present in a noticeable part of the main content of an authoritative website, it will likely gain more clicks. If you are able to secure a backlink from any high-ranking website, ensure that it is positioned well. A good practice to follow here is using a different font color to make it stand out. You can also use engaging anchor texts to make them more likely to be clicked on by the users.
If the linking page offers you a backlink in a section like the sidebars where various other links are present, it is better to pursue other options as there is a significantly less chance that users will click on them.
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Backlinks from trusted websites
It is quite easy to gain an inbound link for your website from an external website. However, the true testament to a good backlink is if you get it from a website that is trusted by search engines. Backlinks from websites with high domain authority can prove to be especially valuable.
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Backlinks from relevant websites
Whenever a website contains a backlink to another website, search engines like to assess how both of these websites are related. For instance, if you have organized a sporting event and written a blog about it, Google will put significant weight on the backlinks obtained by the blog on the sites related to sports or sporting events. Hence, it is important to obtain backlinks from relevant sites in your own domain.
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Dofollow Backlink
Dofollow backlinks help in the sharing of authority between the origin and destination sites. Acquiring dofollow backlinks can help in increasing the destination site’s domain authority and rating. This can help in improving your keyword rankings.
How do I Check my Backlinks?
You can choose from two methods to check your backlinks for two different scenarios. The first method is solely for checking backlinks on websites that you own. The second method is for checking backlinks present on other web pages.
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) provides users with comprehensive reports and data about their owned websites. The data includes metrics like the website’s overall performance, organic search traffic, number of visitors, and much more. This free-to-use tool is quite efficient in checking backlinks on your website.
All you need to do is sign-up for GSC, create your account, and verify your ownership of the website/s that you want to assess.
Once you are signed into the account, click on the “Links” button on the sidebar, and it will show you all the external links on the URL you put into it and the total number of unique backlinks present for the said webpage.
There are three types of reports that GSC gives you:
- Top Linked Pages – This report provides you with the web pages that are linked the most on your website.
- Top Linking Text – This report presents you with the most commonly used anchor texts that are used to link your website.
- Top Linking Sites – This report lets you know the websites that have the most backlinks for your website.
2. Third-Party Backlink Checkers
There are many backlink checkers present on the web that you can use. One of the most efficient backlink checkers is Ahrefs. This tool can help you in finding the total backlinks, along with the best referring domains.
Each backlink brings along the following details:
- Domain Rating (DR) – The strength and rating of the linking website.
- URL Rating (UR) – The strength and rating of the linking webpage where you are aiming to put your backlink.
- Referring Pages – The web pages that link to the target.
- Organic Traffic – The organic search traffic of the linking page to assess whether it is a frequently visited page or not.
- Anchor Text – How strong the anchor text is and if there is scope for improvement.
Ahrefs Site Explorer is a very comprehensive tool that can come in handy for websites wishing to surpass their competition. It shows you how many backlinks your competitors have in the domain and how well they perform for them.
This subsequently helps websites in drafting a backlinking strategy that can elevate the competitors’ strategy to outrank them.
Conclusion
Backlinks are a fundamental part of SEO, acting as endorsements that signal trust and authority to search engines. Earning high-quality backlinks from reputable sources can significantly improve your website’s rankings, drive organic traffic, and enhance credibility. However, not all backlinks are beneficial—poor-quality or spammy links can harm your SEO efforts.
A strategic approach to backlink building is essential for long-term success. Focus on acquiring links from authoritative websites, creating valuable content, and leveraging ethical SEO practices. With the right backlink strategy, your website can gain a competitive edge and achieve sustainable growth in search rankings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link from one website to another. It acts as a vote of confidence, signaling to search engines that the linked website is a valuable and credible source. The more high-quality backlinks a site has, the better its chances of ranking higher in search results.
What is an example of a backlink?
A great example of a backlink would be, Infidigit creates a backlink to SEMRush to further inform readers about a certain SEO topic.
How do backlinks improve SEO?
If there is one thing that the Google algorithm supports are links that offers resourceful content that is both relevant and offers valuable inputs when a search is conducted. This is perfectly true in the case of backlinks as they signal to Google that another resource finds that linked content valuable enough to link to it within their own content. That said, a website earning additional backlinks help create the impression that the website possesses valuable content that is worth ranking well on the SERPs. Therefore, we can surely say that backlinks help optimise your website for search engines.
How many backlinks per month are good for SEO?
While it can be difficult to predict a particular range of backlinks, the count per month varies significantly on the size of your website and its relevance. That said, however, 10 backlinks per month is safe for a new website on average. One must remember that as long as these links are built organically and with Google’s webmaster guidelines, your website should be fine. A wise idea would be to start with a low number of links and increase the quantity each month.
Which is the most powerful type of backlink?
When it comes to SEO, guest posting, an activity of promoting a website through a blog, is a crucial link-building strategy. That said, guest posting backlinks are the most powerful backlinks as they will not only provide you with more “link juice” but also help you to grow your brand.
Which backlink is the least important in SEO?
One type of backlink that can significantly impact your ranking is paid links. Even if it is on a very small scale, buying links is still a bad idea that you must avoid at all costs. This is a type of backlink that can get your website penalized as well.
What is the Difference Between Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks?
Dofollow backlinks pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) to the linked site, helping boost its authority and rankings. In contrast, nofollow backlinks contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute, instructing search engines not to transfer ranking value. While nofollow links don’t directly impact rankings, they can still drive traffic and enhance brand visibility.
How Can I Check My Website’s Backlinks?
You can analyze your website’s backlinks using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz. These tools provide insights into the number of backlinks, their quality, and the referring domains, helping you assess your website’s authority and identify areas for improvement.
What is a Broken Backlink, and How Can I Fix It?
A broken backlink is a link that no longer works, often due to a deleted page or a changed URL. You can fix broken backlinks by redirecting the old URL to a relevant page, reaching out to the linking site to update the link, or replacing it with a new high-quality resource. Fixing broken backlinks improves user experience and prevents lost link equity.
4 thoughts on “What Are Backlinks in SEO & How to Create them”
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That was an amazing article about backlinks, it helps me in understanding how backlinks are important.
thank you very much for the creating backlinks information …