What Are Backlinks & Why They Matter in SEO

What Are Backlinks?

If you have heard about SEO, then you might have also encountered a very common term “backlink” Used frequently with this word SEO.

Backlinks are basically the link of your website found on the other websites. If taken care properly, then back links can increase your Google search rankings and can improve the visibility of your website.

For example, here is a link that directly points on our website:

This is known as a “backlink”. In this case clutch has a link to Werbooz i.e clutch becomes the referring site and Werbooz is the target site.

 Internal Links: Links that navigate from one page to another within the same website.

 Links that point from one website to a different website.Image like this

Can You Rank in Google Without Backlinks?

There is a possibility that you can rank on Google without worrying about backlinks, but the problem is that every time you will struggle to rank. You’ll be only visible while searching for keywords that have low search volumes and low competition.

And if this stays true, then that points towards two things that the keywords that you are ranking on, they don’t generate much traffic. Secondly, those have low value in them, that is even if they bring traffic to your website it will be hard for you to monetise your visitors.

If your end goal is to target an audience, that is hard to monetise and the competition is really low, then go ahead .

But if you want to compete with your competitors and want the traffic that can be monetised. Then you need to integrate back linking into your SEO strategy.

There is no doubt that back links are a really important aspect in google SEO. But there are several other factors on which your google ranking depends :

Search intent

Quality of content

On-page Experience 

XML Architecture of the website

On page & off page SEO optimisations 

Keywords

 If you want to understand these terms in detail refer to this.

Why Are Backlinks Important?

Consider a hypothetical situation in which you want to eat a burger and there are two shops, Shop A and Shop B, in front of you. You are about to go to Shop A, but your friend tells you that he and his six friends often visit Shop B because Shop B’s burgers are really good. Now, where would you go? Would you rather go to Shop A, which you have never visited, or would you select Shop B, where your friend and his friends often visit? Obviously, you will choose Shop B.

Now, let’s relate this to backlinks. Backlinks represent experience, expertise, authority, and trust in the eyes of search engines. So if a website has received backlinks from 50 websites and another website has received backlinks from just one website, then in the eyes of Google, the 50 website links are like votes from other websites, telling Google that this website is valuable, credible, and trustworthy.

So in simple words, the more websites will point towards your website. The More Google will rank your website higher.

And if your website gets backlinks from authoritative sources like Apple & Microsoft, then Google will find your website more trustworthy and credible, and will boost your website visitors, thus increasing your brand awareness and traffic.

To break it down : A site having high authority can pass down authority on your site too, if they have a backlink to your website.

The way Google ranks pages and how it indexes them is quite simple, Google has search engine bots also referred to as ‘crawlers’ or ‘spiders’.  In order to index a page the web crawler goes and crawls the web pages, they find hyperlinks to other URLs on those web pages the crawl bot indexes the current page based on the quality of the content, keywords,page speed, backlinks, Technical SEO, website architecture, etc —  and then crawls to the next page.

You can clearly see why backlinks are crucial for web crawlers, backlinks serve as pathways that help crawlers discover new pages and understand the importance of these pages within the web ecosystem.

Are All Backlinks Valuable for SEO? (Not All Backlinks Are Equal)

There's a common saying that says “all glitters are not gold”. All backlinks are not equal.  From our previous discussion, it is quite clear that the authority of a site matters too. So if I have to put it bluntly then high quality backlinks are much more valuable for your website compared to low quality backlinks, a single high-quality backlink from an authoritative website could be much more powerful than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.

Although there are many types of backlinks, but they can be broadly classified into 4 types:

Dofollow Backlinks

Nofollow Backlinks

Sponsored Backlinks

UGC Backlinks

Links that can harm your SEO | Google's Spam Policies :

Google doesn't just blindly follow backlinks, Sometimes Google may ignore back links that appear low in quality or are irrelevant with the content.  If you have paid a website to promote your website, via back link then sometimes things won't go as you expect them to go because Google also ignores backlinks from unestablished or spammy sites And Google doesn't want to influence these websites to show them more in search results.

So in any case, you must avoid following bad practices that do not comply with Google’s link spam policies.  

Some of the common bad practises that you must completely avoid are: 

Exchanging money, goods, or services for backlinks

Link exchanges (i.e., “Your wellbeing is my well-being, link me and I promise to link you back”)

Automating programs that create links to your site

Forcing keywords (queries you want to rank for) into anchor text in a spammy way

Do Follow Links & No Follow Links : 

There are two types of links, Do follow and No follow And as their name suggests the do follow links are the links that pass on SEO value and no follow do not, SEO value is sometimes also known as link equity or "link juice". By default, all links are Dofollow links unless specified.

Why Use Nofollow Links?

So why would someone want to use a Nofollow link?

Are they plotting something against you?

No, Not at all!

No follow links are used to prevent spammy or low quality websites from gaining SEO benefits,  Google takes these steps to make sure that spammy sites do not unfairly boost their rankings with the help of backlinks.

One more important reason for using no follow links is to comply with Google's policies on paid links. For instance, if there is a website placing a paid advertisement on another site, then the promoting site must use the rel="sponsored" attribute to signal google that the link is paid. This avoids penalties from google and ensures transparency in advertising practices.

Moreover,  There could be one more case where websites might use Nofollow links when they want to link to another site without endorsing or promoting it by passing on SEO value. This allows websites to provide a link for informational purposes without affecting their own credibility and to avoid promoting the linked sites to search engines.

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