What Are Backlinks?
A backlink is one website pointing at another. It began life as a recommendation, which is exactly why it became something worth forging. Every complication in this subject comes from that single fact, as does the entire industry that grew around it.
What A Backlink Is
A backlink is a link on somebody else's website that points to yours. If a trade magazine writes about your industry and links to a page on your site, that link is a backlink. They are also called inbound links. The two terms mean the same thing.
One clarification saves a great deal of confusion later. A link is a single object with two names, depending on which end you are standing at. To you it is a backlink coming in. To the site that published it, the same link is an outbound link going out. Nothing about the link changes. Only the perspective does, which matters because advice written for publishers reads very differently from advice written for the people hoping to be linked to.
It follows from the definition that you cannot make one yourself. A link from one page of your own site to another page of your own site is an internal link, which is a genuinely useful thing and an entirely different subject. A backlink requires a second party. That constraint is the reason this whole field exists.
What follows explains why links came to matter, what a link is actually made of and why two of them can differ in value by orders of magnitude. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
Why They Mattered In The First Place
Early search engines had a problem with no obvious solution. Given a thousand pages that all claim to be about the same subject, which one should come first? The words on the page cannot settle it, because anybody can write anything about themselves. Something outside the page was needed.
The answer came from academic publishing, where a paper cited by many others is generally more significant than one cited by nobody. Treat a link as a citation and the web becomes a vast network of references, each one a small vote for the page it points at. A page that many others thought worth pointing at is probably worth reading. As a proxy for quality it was elegant, cheap to compute and surprisingly effective.
The part worth understanding is why it worked, because it was not really about links. It worked because links were expensive. In the early web, publishing anything required owning a domain, paying for hosting and knowing how to build a page. Almost nobody could do it. A link therefore cost something real to give. A signal that costs something to send is a reliable signal.
Then publishing became free and effectively unlimited. Anybody could create a thousand pages in an afternoon and point every one of them at whatever they liked. The cost of sending the signal collapsed to nothing. With it went the reliability that made the signal worth listening to. Everything difficult about this subject follows from that one change.
The Anatomy Of A Link
People talk about links as though each one were a single unit. A link has parts. Knowing what each contributes makes the rest of this cluster legible.
The source page
The specific page the link sits on, which is not the same as the website it belongs to. This distinction is where a great deal of money gets wasted, because a well regarded site can host a page nobody reads and nothing has indexed. The page is what carries the link, so the page is what matters.
The anchor text
The visible words that are clickable. It tells a reader what to expect and tells a search engine what the destination is about. This is the most abused part of a link, because it is the part a buyer can most easily specify, which is why unnatural anchor patterns are among the more obvious signs of arrangement.
The attribute
An optional declaration the publisher can attach, stating something about the nature of the link. Covered in the next block.
The position on the page
Whether the link sits inside the main body of the writing, in a sidebar, in a footer or in a comment. A link in the middle of a paragraph somebody is reading behaves very differently from one in a list at the bottom of every page on the site.
The surrounding context
The sentence and paragraph around the link. Context tells a search engine what the link is about, so a link introduced by a relevant sentence carries information that an unexplained link in a list of names does not.
Followed And Unfollowed
By default a link carries no attribute at all, which means the publisher is simply linking. Such a link is commonly described as followed, meaning a search engine may treat it as an ordinary reference from one page to another.
A publisher can also add an attribute declaring that it does not wish to vouch for the destination. That is the nofollow attribute. Understanding why it was created explains most of what people find confusing about it. It arrived as an answer to comment spam. Blogs and forums allow anybody to post, so anybody could post links. Publishers had no way of separating a genuine recommendation in an article from a link somebody dropped in a comment box at three in the morning. The attribute let them keep the comments open while declining to endorse what appeared in them.
Two further attributes were introduced later for related purposes, allowing a publisher to declare that a link is sponsored or that it was placed by a user rather than by the publication.
What matters at this stage is the principle. The attribute is a statement by the publisher about the nature of the link rather than a verdict on the site being linked to. A link carrying one is not a bad link. It can still send real visitors and put a business in front of an audience. The detail of how these are treated, plus whether it is worth pursuing them, sits in our guide to whether nofollow links help SEO.
What A Link Does And Does Not Do
A link does three things. It is worth separating them, because businesses usually only think about the second.
It helps a page be found. Search engines discover pages by following links. A page nothing points at is harder to find, which is why brand new sites with no links often sit unindexed for a while.
It supports a page's standing. The one everybody means when they talk about backlinks. A page pointed at by relevant, credible sources is more likely to be treated as worth showing.
It sends actual people. The most underrated of the three and the only one that is fully measurable. A link in a widely read trade publication can produce enquiries directly, entirely separately from anything it does for rankings. It is also the only benefit that survives whatever any search engine decides next.
Now the limits. A link cannot fix a page nobody wants. If a page does not answer the question being asked, pointing links at it does not make it the answer. The money spent obtaining them is spent for nothing.
It does not work in isolation either. Links are one input among many, alongside whether the content is any good, whether the site works properly and how relevant the page is to the query. And it does not act immediately, which is covered in our guide to how long a backlink takes to affect rankings.
Why They Get Gamed
Once search became the route by which customers found businesses, position in search results became worth money. Real money, measurable monthly. At the same time it was widely understood that links influenced position.
Put those two facts together and the consequence is inevitable. If holding a position is worth a certain amount each month while links contribute to holding it, then links have a price a business would rationally pay. Anything with a price attracts suppliers. A market appeared. It has existed ever since, because the underlying arithmetic has never stopped working.
That market produced everything this cluster has to warn about: networks of sites built to sell placements, articles written purely to house a link, directories that exist for no other purpose, arrangements between businesses that swap links wholesale. None of it is mysterious. All of it is the predictable result of a valuable signal that turned out to be cheap to manufacture.
Google has spent two decades responding, which is the other half of the story. Its published guidance names link schemes as a violation, its systems discount links it does not trust rather than counting them and it has introduced attributes allowing publishers to declare paid and user placed links. The result is an arms race in which the manufactured version of the signal keeps getting cheaper while its value keeps getting written down. How the detection side of that works is covered in how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns.
Why Two Links Are Not Worth The Same
Counting links treats them as interchangeable units, in the way that counting coins works because every ten pence piece is worth ten pence. Links are not like that. The distance between the best and worst is not a matter of degree.
Consider two links. The first sits inside an article in a publication your customers read, written by somebody who chose to reference your page because it explained something well. The second sits in a list at the bottom of a page on a site with no readers, alongside four hundred other links to unrelated businesses, on a domain created to host exactly that.
Both appear as one link in a report. One is a recommendation from a source that matters in your field. The other is a line of text nobody will ever see. Treating those as comparable is how businesses end up with impressive numbers and no results.
The uncomfortable corollary is that most links do nothing measurable. That is the normal condition rather than a failure. A profile of two hundred links might contain a dozen that are genuinely working. That is not a sign something went wrong. It is what a real profile looks like, because most references in the world are incidental.
What separates the two ends of that range is mostly relevance, taken apart properly in our guide to what relevance really means in backlink evaluation.
Common Misunderstandings
Four assumptions cause most of the wasted money in this field. Each is reasonable until somebody explains the mechanism.
That more is always better. It is not, because the units are not equivalent. Adding fifty links from places nobody reads changes nothing except the number in a report. A profile that grows in that shape can also look arranged rather than earned.
That any link helps. Most links do nothing at all, which is different from harming you. The realistic expectation is that a small proportion of any profile is doing the work.
That competitors can easily damage you. Pointing unpleasant links at a rival produces links that happened to them rather than links they arranged. That category is generally discounted. It is a common worry and a rare event.
That a link works immediately. It has to be discovered, crawled, indexed and then weighed. The delay lives in the gaps between those stages. Expecting a movement the week a link appears leads businesses to conclude that something failed when nothing has happened yet. If the discipline itself is what you are weighing up, our guide to what link building is takes that on directly.
A dozen that work
beats two hundred.
We judge a link by relevance, placement and whether the page is genuinely read, rather than by a number in a report. No purchased placements, no networks, no price per link. If links are not your constraint we will say so before quoting.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
This page covers the basics. The rest of the series covers what makes one link worth more than another, how to get them, how patterns are detected, what the metrics are worth and when links are not the right spend at all.
