Many people think successful SEO is all about keywords, but quite often backlinks can have more of an impact on a site's rankings. A backlink is simply a link from another site to yours. Google loves backlinks - it sees each one as a vote of confidence, a signal that your content is worth visiting, citing, or sharing. The more high quality votes you earn, the more likely Google is to push your pages towards the top of the results.
What backlinks tell Google
Search engines are able to read your content and get a good idea of how high quality it is by how it is written and structured. However, to truly assess the strength and trustworthiness of your content, they need to see how the rest of the web reacts to it. When trusted sites link to you, they're essentially saying 'this page is useful, accurate or relevant'. This contributes to your own website's credibility - known as its 'domain authority'. Ultimately, the idea is that strong, reputable sites attract links from other strong, reputable sites.
Why Google cares so much
Anyone nowadays can claim to be expert, but these claims don't mean anything if nobody endorses you. At the same time, the people who do endorse you need to be respected themselves. This is why Google cares about backlinks - and why quality of links matters more than quantity.
Links from spammy, irrelevant or manipulative sources are a red flag. Links from respected, focused and contextually relevant sites are a green flag. The best signals all come from natural backlinks - sites voluntarily linking to your site without any prompting - however these natural backlinks are hard to obtain unless you've already got some web presence, which is where earned backlinks come in.
How to earn high quality backlinks
To encourage backlinks from high quality sites, you can try pitching to these sites and asking whether you can publish a guest post. However, a better strategy is to invest in digital PR, helping you to secure links on respected sites via articles and blog posts that aren't written by you.
You may naturally be able to encourage high quality backlinks by creating content that is truly worth linking to. This includes in-depth guides, original research, useful tools, fascinating infographics or engaging videos. By sharing this content on social media, you may be able to help spread awareness of it. Content that goes viral is likely to be picked up by news publications and trusted influencers - but, of course, make sure you go viral for the right reasons.
Be careful with links that don't help
Not every link is equal in Google's eyes. Some links exist for commercial tracking rather than editorial endorsement, such as many affiliate links. Links that come from low-quality directories, private networks and obviously paid placements are also not viewed favourably. Rely too heavily on these types of links, and you could dilute your profile or even harm your visibility.
Overall, Google loves backlinks because they reflect what people actually find useful on the web. You should love them too, because they will ultimately bring you higher rankings, referral traffic, brand awareness and increased trust.
Why Google Loves Backlinks (And Why You Should Too)