DefinitionA link from another website to a page on your site. Search engines treat backlinks as votes of confidence, so relevant links from trusted sites help pages rank higher.
A backlink is simply a hyperlink on someone else’s site that points to yours. Google’s original insight was that a link is a recommendation, and that a recommendation from a trusted, relevant site is worth more than one from a random directory. Twenty-five years later that is still roughly how it works. The thing people get wrong is counting links instead of weighing them. A hundred links from spammy blogs do less for you than one link from a trade publication your customers actually read, and can do harm.
Why backlinks still move rankings
Content and technical quality get a page into the running. Links are often what decides between two pages that are both good. For competitive commercial queries in e-commerce this is very visible: two Dutch webshops selling the same garden furniture with similar category pages, and the one with links from interior blogs, a national newspaper’s shopping section and a couple of supplier sites sits three positions higher. Three positions on a query with 5,000 searches a month can mean a difference of several hundred visits and a noticeable share of monthly revenue.
For B2B sites the effect is similar but the volumes are smaller, so each link counts more. A single mention in an industry association’s member list or a case study on a partner’s site can lift a whole cluster of service pages. Backlinks are the core of off-page SEO, and unlike on-page SEO they are not fully under your control, which is exactly why Google trusts them.
How to see and measure your backlink profile
Google Search Console has a Links report that lists your top linked pages and top linking sites. It is free and it is Google’s own data, but it is limited and slow to update. For real analysis I use Ahrefs Site Explorer: referring domains over time, the Domain Rating of each linking site, which pages receive the links, the anchor texts, and the same figures for competitors. Semrush’s Backlink Analytics gives comparable numbers. The two tools disagree on details, but the trends match.
The metric I look at first is not total backlinks but referring domains, because ten links from one site count roughly as one. Then I check the ratio of dofollow to nofollow, whether the anchor texts look natural (mostly brand names and URLs, not exact-match keywords) and whether any linking sites are obviously spam. A referring domains graph that jumps by 500 in a week is either a press moment or a problem. The Lost links report tells you which links disappeared, and the Broken backlinks report shows links pointing at pages that now return a 404 error, which is the cheapest link win there is.
Common backlink mistakes
Buying links in bulk. Packages of “50 high DA links” are the fastest way to a manual penalty or, more often, to a pile of links Google simply ignores. The money is wasted either way.
Chasing metrics instead of relevance. A DR 70 site about cryptocurrency linking to a Belgian bathroom webshop does very little. A DR 30 Belgian interior blog does more.
Pointing every link at the homepage. Homepages usually have enough authority. The category and service pages that actually need to rank are the ones that need links.
Over-optimised anchor text. If half your links say “goedkope tuinmeubelen kopen”, the pattern is obvious. Natural links mostly use the brand name or a plain URL.
Losing links during a migration. A redesign changes URLs, nobody sets up redirects, and years of earned links now point to nothing. This is a technical SEO failure that undoes off-page work in one afternoon.
How I approach link building in client work
I start with what the client already has: suppliers, partners, industry associations, trade fairs, local press, customers with websites. Most businesses have a dozen easy links sitting in their own network that nobody ever asked for. Then I reclaim what was lost: broken backlinks, unlinked brand mentions and old URLs that still receive links but redirect nowhere. Only after that do I look at outreach, and then I pick a small number of sites the client’s customers actually read rather than a long list of blogs that exist only to sell links.
For webshops I often find that the best link assets are not the product pages but useful content: a sizing guide, a comparison, a piece of original data from the shop’s own orders. Those pages earn links and then pass authority to the categories through internal links. That is the model behind my link building service: fewer, better links, aimed at the pages that need them, with a paper trail showing where every link came from.
Frequently asked questions
Do nofollow links have any value?
Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a hard rule since 2019, so a nofollow link from a strong, relevant site may pass some signal. More importantly, nofollow links from places like Wikipedia, news sites or forums bring real visitors and often lead to dofollow links from people who found you there. A healthy profile has a mix of both; a profile with zero nofollow links looks artificial.
How many backlinks do I need to rank?
It depends entirely on who you are competing with for a given query. Look at the top five results in Ahrefs and compare their referring domains to the linking page, not the whole site. If they have 15 to 30 referring domains and you have two, you know the gap. For many long-tail B2B queries the answer is very few, and content quality decides.
Should I disavow bad links?
Rarely. Google now ignores most spammy links automatically, and disavowing links that were doing no harm achieves nothing. I only use the disavow tool when there is a manual action in Search Console or a clear history of paid link schemes that need cleaning up before new work starts.