The Truth About Backlinks: Why Quality Matters for SEO

Backlinks are links from other websites that lead directly to your own website. For example, if a blog post from another site linked to your page, that would be a backlink to your site. Backlinks are essential for SEO because they indicate to search engines how popular and relevant a website is. Search engines, including Google, crawl the internet looking for links and determine how much weight to apply to each one based on a mostly unknown criteria. A website with many backlinks shows that it is popular and relevant, which can lead to higher rankings in search engine results and therefore gain more organic traffic.
However, the truth about backlinks is that having the most number of links is not necessarily a good thing because all backlinks are not created equally. If a backlink is tagged as ‘nofollow’ then it provides no power to the linked website. Spammy links also won’t help as backlinks are given power based on the referring website, so it must be relevant to the linking site to have the best effect.