What Is A Backlink and Why Are They Important

What is a backlink? A backlink, often referred to as a link, is a mention of your website, on an external website. From the screenshot below, you can see that website A links to website B. As a result, site A has an external link to site B, and site B has a backlink from site A. Quite simple. So now you know what a backlink is, let’s find out exactly why they’re important. If we go back to our car analogy, you wouldn’t be saying that Onpage SEO is the car’s wheels and the chassis, where Offpage SEO would be the car’s engine. So let’s imagine we’ve done Onpage to perfection.

And we have the best wheels in the car, and the strongest chassis, and so on, and so on. Who is now to put in an old engine from 100 years ago, we obviously wouldn’t get the best results. The car for example, it might keep running into issues, or even worse, it might fail to start. This is why backlinks are super important. Typically Onpage SEO isn’t enough to get you to page one. However, what Onpage SEO does do, is provide you a really strong foundation, which you can then build upon. The backlink represents a vote of confidence from one site to another. In essence, backlinks to your website, are a signal to Google that others vouch for your content.

SEMRush carried out a test in July 2017, which measured the biggest ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. As you’ll see from the image below, the fifth biggest factor was referring domains, which essentially means the amount of links you have from unique websites, aka backlinks. And if you actually look below that, you also see, backlinks is right under referring domains, in position six. In short, backlinks are huge, and can really push a site higher up in Google, however, like anything with great power, comes great responsibility, and doing too much or too many backlinks can do a lot of harm for your website. This is especially true if they’re low quality backlinks. Here’s an example of a backlink we have for Level Finish.

It’s a backlink from a website called Small Business Sense. In this article, Small Business Sense is talking about why you should use a professional flooring contractor and basically, not do it yourself. If you look closely in the middle of the second paragraph, you’ll see there’s a link in there, which if clicked will direct you to Level Finish’s homepage. This link is a clear vote of confidence, and the type of backlink we want to have. And it’s a clear signal to Google, that Level Finish has to be considered in its rankings, as it has a strong backlink, which as we know, is super important when it comes to ranking websites.