Glossary
What is Backlink?
A backlink is a link to your site from another website. Links from trusted, relevant sites are one of the strongest ranking signals.
Updated
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat links as votes of confidence, so links from trusted, relevant sites help a page rank.
Quality over quantity
One link from a respected site in your field is worth far more than hundreds from low-quality ones. Spammy or paid links can do harm.
How sites earn them
- Useful content others want to cite: original data, thorough guides, free tools.
- Being the source: research or statistics people reference.
- Outreach: sharing a genuinely useful resource with people it helps.
- Digital PR, partnerships and being quoted.
What to avoid
Buying links, link exchanges at scale, and automated link building. They violate search engine guidelines.
Attributes
A link can carry rel="nofollow", sponsored or ugc to tell search engines not to treat it as an endorsement.
Free tools and original, well-sourced articles are among the most reliable ways to earn links naturally.
Related
- Topical authorityTopical authority is how thoroughly a site covers a subject. Search engines tend to trust sites that cover a topic in depth over sites that touch it once.
- E-E-A-TE-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality guidelines use to judge whether content deserves to rank.
- Internal linkingInternal links are links from one page of your site to another. They help readers navigate and help search engines find pages and understand how they relate.