Why backlinks
still matter.
A link from another site is one of the oldest ways a search engine decides what to trust. It still is, just not in the way most link sellers describe.
What a backlink is
A backlink is a link on someone else’s site that points to yours. From their side it is an outbound link; from yours it is inbound, or a backlink. The words you click on are its anchor text.
That is all it is. What makes it worth anything is where it sits, and that is most of what these guides are about.
Links are how pages get found
Search engines do not know a page exists until something leads them to it. Google says one of the main ways it discovers new pages is by following links from pages it already knows. A sitemap can tell it about your pages too, but a link from a page it visits often is the surest way in.
For a new site, this is the part that matters most. A good product with nothing pointing at it can wait a long time to be found.
Links are read as a recommendation
The idea behind PageRank, the system Google was founded on, is that a link from one page to another is a kind of vote, and a vote from a page that is itself well linked counts for more. Google still lists link analysis and PageRank among its ranking systems today.
Links also tell it what a page is about. Google’s own guidance on links says the anchor text and the words around a link help it understand the page on the other end. A link that says “a booking tool for illustrators” in an article about taking commissions says a great deal more than a bare URL in a list.
Links send people
This is the one benefit that does not depend on any algorithm. A link in an article your buyer is already reading sends you someone who was interested before they arrived. It is also the only part you can check for yourself: the visits show up in your analytics, and the signups either follow or they do not.
What changed
Because links were counted, people started manufacturing them: buying them, swapping them, and generating them in bulk. Google’s response has been to discount links that exist only to be counted. Its spam policies name buying links for ranking, excessive link exchanges and links created by automated programs as link spam, and say that sites taking part can rank lower or drop out of results altogether.
The practical consequence is that the number of links you have tells you much less than it used to. Which pages link to you, and why, tells you almost everything.
What links cannot do
A link will not rescue a page that does not answer the search. Google uses many signals, and the page itself comes first. Nobody can promise you a ranking, and anyone who does is guessing.
What links can do is help good pages get found, understood and trusted, and bring the right readers along with them. That is worth doing well rather than doing a lot of.
So what should you do?
Stop asking how to get more links and start asking which pages would be better for their readers with a link to you. That question has a smaller answer, and a much more useful one. The next guide is about how to tell those pages apart from the rest.