Backlinks

A backlink is a hyperlink that points from someone else's website to your own. Search engines read such a link as a recommendation: a page that is linked often, and from strong, topically related sites, is treated as more relevant. What decides the value is not the number of links but the quality of the linking domains.

What are backlinks?

A backlink - also called an inbound or incoming link - is a hyperlink from one website to another. The number of backlinks a website has allows conclusions about its popularity and relevance. For search engines such as Google, backlinks are a very important criterion. Backlinks with high link popularity generally have a positive influence on the ranking of a website in search results.

Search engines like Google rate backlinks positively, because content that attracts links is seen as valuable. What matters here is less the number than the quality of the backlinks. Ten different backlinks from unknown domains can pass considerably less link equity than a single backlink from a well-known, topically relevant domain. Newer websites in particular benefit from backlinks, because they speed up discovery and indexing in search engines. Backlinks also generate traffic for a website. For these reasons they are one of the most important building blocks of search engine optimization.

Link building with internal and external links

External links point from one domain to another. Internal links are references that stay inside your own website or domain. Anchor links from your own page to another can be used to provide additional information for visitors.

Both external and internal links matter for SEO. Your own links pointing to external pages can be a great help for the reader, but they do relatively little for your own SEO: the SEO benefit initially goes to the page being linked to. Internal links support link building passively. That happens, for instance, when the linking page has itself earned an external backlink and therefore carries a high value. That value is passed on when it links to another page of yours.

Internal links have several further advantages for SEO. When search engines find a website they follow the links to discover further pages. During a visit they archive as many relevant pages as possible. Internal links also form the structure of the website. A logical link structure is both visually pleasing and effective. It helps to organise the content and helps visitors find information faster.

Are there bad backlinks?

Yes, there are. Incoming links from websites with unrelated content count as less relevant. If a website about football receives a link from the page of a football club, high relevance is a given. A backlink from a page about breeding fish, on the other hand, would have very little relevance. If the backlink additionally comes from a domain with a low domain value, the effect can be negative. A note on history: domain value used to be determined mainly by Google PageRank. The PageRank algorithm is outdated, however, and Google uses better and far more complicated logic today. Its place has been taken by third-party estimates summarised under the term Domain Authority.

A bad backlink can also come from untrustworthy sources. Websites that have been penalised and that violate Google's webmaster guidelines can count as bad backlinks. A webmaster should therefore check continuously where the backlinks come from. Backlinks can be disavowed through the Google Search Console.

Backlink checker - testing your own site for backlinks

A backlink checker helps to monitor a link profile. It can notify the webmaster immediately when a URL with a low domain value links to their own site. At the same time you see which high-quality websites link to you. That gives a webmaster a better picture of which content resonates best with readers. Numerous free SEO tools for a thorough backlink analysis are available on the web.

How to build backlinks

To climb in the rankings, continuous link building is indispensable. Webmasters would like to hear something else, but building high-quality backlinks is not easy and cannot be planned directly. What matters first and foremost is high-quality content. Google's algorithm will reward that in the medium term and list the page high up. A good ranking is essential for attracting backlinks in the first place.

A website also has to keep an eye on its OnPage optimization. Whoever meets Google's standards will see good ranking results quickly. That raises awareness and increases the response on the web. One backlink or another will then arrive all by itself. A well-planned appearance on social media can additionally trigger a viral effect. Once a project goes viral, many external URLs will link to your website.

With advertising, everything happens faster and more easily. Advertising through click campaigns or sending marketing e-mails to the right target audience gets you a long way. Your site inevitably finds interested visitors that way and stays in the conversation. On top of that, traffic is generated, which brings further advantages for your SEO.

Last but not least: whoever does no marketing at all and is left to their own devices will have a hard time. Search Google for other, topically relevant sites and webmasters. Evaluate the results and write to a site operator, blogger or influencer. One thing matters here: false modesty is out of place. Keep in mind that this audience - bloggers in particular - depends on fresh content.

A second effect is becoming increasingly relevant: generative search systems draw heavily on specialist portals and comparison sites for their answers. Mentions on other people's sites therefore no longer pay into classic rankings alone, but also into Generative Engine Optimization.

Nofollow and dofollow - a big difference

When building links you have to keep in mind that there are different kinds of them. Nofollow links do not allow search engines to follow the link. If a site owner links to a URL with the rel="nofollow" value, they pass no link information to the bots. Only humans will be able to follow the link. This works to the disadvantage of the linked URL, because it does not benefit from the domain value of the backlink. Although Google claims that this plays no role in how links are weighted, the ranking effect is still noticeably weaker than with dofollow links.

Dofollow links are all links that are not marked as nofollow. When an external webmaster links back to your website, search engines and humans alike can follow it. The best way to use a dofollow link is to allow keywords in the anchor. With such anchor links the desired keyword is used as the link text.

Buying backlinks

Backlinks should always be natural. Buying backlinks is not suitable for link building and can cause a lot of problems. Google treats it as circumventing its algorithm and penalises it consistently these days. Indirectly, Google can even recognise patterns that indicate links were bought. Entire networks have been penalised for it in the past.

Besides a lot of money, buying backlinks costs a webmaster a lot of effort. Any webmaster who considers themselves smarter than Google should reconsider. Our view: the risk is not worth it, and real content is worth more than a full wallet. For anyone who does not care, the following still applies:

• Only place backlinks on websites with a relevant topic.
• Do not organise several backlinks at the same time.
• Place backlinks inside a text that is relevant to the content.
• Use a keyword as the anchor.