By A10 Digital. Published .
A backlink is a link on someone else’s website that points to yours. Search engines treat it as a sign that another site found your page worth referring to, which is why backlinks have long been one of the signals used to rank pages.
Why do backlinks matter?
A search engine cannot visit your premises or ask your customers. It looks for evidence on the web, and a link from a relevant, trusted site is evidence that your page is worth showing. Links are also how search engines discover new pages in the first place.
What makes a good backlink?
Search engines do not publish how links are weighed, but these qualities are widely seen as marking a good one.
- Relevance. A link from a site in your trade or your area carries more meaning than one from an unrelated site.
- Trust. A link from a well-established site counts for more than one from a site nobody reads.
- Placement. A link in the body of an article says more than one buried in a footer.
- Anchor text. The clickable words tell the search engine what the linked page is about.
How do businesses earn backlinks?
By being worth mentioning. Trade bodies and suppliers list their members and stockists. Local press covers local news. Useful guides and original figures get quoted. These take longer than buying links, and they do not put the site at risk.
Is buying backlinks a risk?
Yes. Google’s spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and a site caught doing it can lose visibility.
Where do backlinks sit within SEO?
They are the main part of off-page SEO, the work that happens away from your own website. Our guide explains how it relates to on-page SEO and the technical side.
Related service: SEO agency from A10 Digital.