What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important for SEO? (2024)

In Google’s explanation of how they generate search engine results, shown above, they state that backlinks are one of the factors they take into consideration to determine how prominent a given page should be.

This ties in most closely with the “A” (authority) portion of Google’s E-E-A-T signals that they train their quality rater workforce to evaluate in their job of analyzing the quality of the search engine results. This concept of authority largely hinges on whether third party publications recognize your page as an authoritative source, and they signal this by either linking to or mentioning your publication.

For example, a gardening site, or site about wildlife linking to a hedgehog mapping website tells Google that it considers this to be an authoritative resource on the subject at hand. The more often relevant sites link to your published content, the better your chances of being displayed as an authoritative resource in Google’s search engine results. The quest, then, to earn lots of high quality backlinks from trusted websites has become a cornerstone of SEO work.

3. Backlinks as a source of competitive intelligence

Because backlinks are believed to play such a big role in how pages and websites rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs), it stands to reason that being able to find out who is linking to your competitors could give you a sense of the sources you’ll need to earn links from to level up or surpass the competition.

In general, what you’re looking for is backlinks from high-quality publications that are relevant to yours. Is it easy to see the relationship between a site or page? In the example we've been using through out this article it's easy to understand the relationship between a site or page that focuses on eco-friendly gardening and a second site or page that is explaining how to ensure you’re making a place in your garden for an endangered species, like hedgehogs. It would be less understandable if the hedgehog site had earned links from an online shoe store, or a site devoted to fashion, or cooking. In evaluating your competitors’ backlinks you’ll want to consider whether all the links they’ve earned are truly high quality, or if some of them are not so good and possibly even represent link spam.

But in order to assess the state of your own backlinks or your competitors’, you’ll need to be able to look at them all in one place, and this brings us to the subject of SEO tools.

Previously, you could simply use a command called a search operator by typing the phrase link: along with a URL into a Google’s search box to see a list of sites linking to the URL in question, but Google deprecated this function in 2017. Today, you have multiple options for seeing your own backlinks, like adding your site as a property to Google Search Console and then running a backlink report, but it’s important to know that this free report will only include a sample of your backlinks and may represent old data instead of updated information about all your current backlinks. It doesn’t represent all the links you’ve earned and it doesn’t give you information about your competitors’ backlink profiles.

Because most site owners and SEOs will want more intelligence than this to help them with the goal of earning maximum SERP visibility,, excellent tools have been developed to offer more insight into many aspects of backlinks and link building. Sign up for a free trial of Moz Pro and get access to multiple link-related features.

Because of the power of backlinks to provide authority to your overall domain and individual website pages, you’ll want to understand the basic concept of a good link vs. a bad one. It’s highly recommended that you read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building for complete education on this vital topic, but here we can summarize the following:

Good links:

• Come from trusted sources that have a meaningful relevance to your organization, like the hedgehog map example at the top of this article.

• Result from the quality of your content publication being so excellent that third parties either link to it without being asked, or feel comfortable linking to it if asked because it is of genuine use and interest to their audience.

• Are devoid of any money or perks changing hands in exchange for links

• Are thoughtfully requested at a modest scale - not the result of sending out hundreds or thousands or mass link requests to huge lists of domains regardless of relevance

• Feature diverse anchor text, instead of the same anchor text across hundreds of links

• Take the Internet user where they expect to go, rather than redirecting them to an unexpected URL for manipulative purposes

  See Also

  A Simple Guide on How To Conduct Backlink Analysis

• Are equally visible to both people and search engine crawlers - not hidden in any way

Bad links:

• Result from the exchange of money or perks

• Result from large scale link exchange schemes

• Come from sites that are engaging in paid links schemes or other spam behaviors

• Include any attempt to inject hidden links into website pages by exploiting security flaws

• Have a pattern of over-using specific keywords in anchor text at scale in hopes of manipulating search engines

While growing your good backlinks over time should help your website build authority, it’s crucial to know that Google specifically calls out bad link building practices in their Webmaster Guidelines, and can heavily penalize websites that engage in forbidden link building practices.

Backlinks are something you can give as well as receive. Any time you link out from your site to a third party site, you’re conferring authority to that third party. There is a persistent myth that providing backlinks to third parties somehow drains your site of power, but this is simply not the case. In fact, Google’s John Mueller has stated:

“Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Often, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.”

In other words, if a hedgehog realated site published an article about the best hedges to plant in your garden to shelter hedgehogs and they linked out to the eco-friendly gardening site for more information on native hedging plants, it’s signaling that both publications exist in a related world of ideas and information. So long as what you link to is of real benefit to your site’s visitors (and you aren’t engaging in any of the bad link building practices) linking out can be a positive thing.