What Are Backlinks, and Why Do They Still Matter?

By A Cardona — September 15, 2026

A backlink is a link from another website that points to yours. That's the whole definition. No trick to it.

What makes backlinks worth caring about is what they signal. When another site links to you, it's a small vote of confidence. Their editor, their audience, their readers all get a path to your content because someone decided it was worth pointing at. Google built its entire original ranking algorithm around counting and weighing those votes, and while the algorithm has grown a lot more sophisticated since 1998, that core idea never went away.

Why Google still cares

Google has said many times that links remain one of the top few ranking factors, alongside content relevance and page experience. The reason is practical: anyone can write "we're the best plumber in Austin" on their own homepage. It's much harder to convince the Austin Chamber of Commerce, a local news site, or a supplier's partner directory to link to you. That difficulty is exactly what makes the signal useful. It's evidence from outside your own website.

Not all backlinks are equal

A link from a real, relevant, well-trafficked site is worth far more than a hundred links from spammy directories nobody visits. A few things separate a good backlink from a wasted one:

• Relevance. A link from a site in your industry or local area means more than one from an unrelated site.
• Authority. Sites that already rank well and get real traffic pass along more weight.
• Placement. A link inside real editorial content beats one buried in a footer or a comment section.
• Follow status. Most links pass ranking value by default (these are called 'dofollow'), but some carry a 'nofollow' tag that tells Google not to count them for ranking, even though they can still send real visitors.

If you've ever seen SEO advice pushing you to buy backlinks in bulk from link farms, ignore it. Google's spam policies specifically target manipulative link schemes like that, and getting caught can hurt your rankings more than having no links at all.

Where backlinks actually come from

Real ones almost always trace back to a real relationship or a real reason someone wanted to reference you: a supplier listing you as a stockist, a local blog reviewing your service, a journalist quoting your data, an industry directory that vets its listings. That's why link building is slower than most other marketing work. You're not buying an ad slot, you're earning a mention.

This is the part of SEO Verrly exists to make less tedious. Scout searches for realistic link opportunities in your niche (the kind of resource pages, supplier directories, and roundups mentioned above) and drafts a personalized outreach email for each one, so you're not starting from a blank inbox every time you want to build authority the right way.

If you want to see where you currently stand, our free backlink scanner will show you what's already pointing at your site.