What are backlinks and why you need to know about them

When you start working on promoting your project on the Internet, sooner or later you will encounter concepts such as “link building,” “link mass,” “backlinks,” “backlink donors,” and other terms that are not very clear to an average Internet user. If you are wondering what backlinks are, let’s avoid confusion and quickly figure out what backlinks to a website are and what the other terms mean.

What are backlinks?

Let’s explain complex things in simple words. The term “backlink” comes from the English word “backlink”, which literally means “reverse link”. This is what we call links that lead to your website from other resources.

Even simpler:

Suppose you have a website, let’s call it X, and you have prepared and want to publish an article about yourself or your services with a link to your site X on the pages of some news or informational resource (let’s call it Y). So, the link in your article published on resource Y will be a backlink for your website X.

Depending on your goals and the method of placement, there are the following types of backlinks:

• temporary;
• permanent, placed in posts;
• permanent, placed in articles.

Everything here is very simple and clear: temporary backlinks are placed for a specific, pre-agreed period and then removed; permanent links, under special conditions, remain for the entire period the trusted platform where they are placed is functioning.

Why is this needed and what does it give to the website?

The presence of backlinks gives the website one main thing — link mass. This refers to the total value of all mentions of resource X on the Internet. Note that this concerns only direct mentions, meaning a direct link to the resource that starts with https://X-site.com or http://X-site.com. The only difference is in the secure or non-secure protocol (did you notice the letter “s” at the end of http?). But we won’t delve into this topic, as it deserves a separate article.

So, link mass is needed for a website for one important reason — search engines pay attention to it when ranking (sorting websites in the search results for a particular query). Search engines even have special metrics to measure link mass (for example, PageRank in Google).

The quantity and quality of link mass determine the effectiveness of SEO promotion of a resource in search engines. Proper selection of donors will help improve the website’s positions. We recommend that you review promotion cases and make sure that a comprehensive approach always brings results. This is exactly where the question arises: why buy links for your site? This helps you quickly build up high-quality link mass and achieve higher rankings in search results.

What are donors, recipients, and link weight?

But not every backlink will be useful for promotion. Placement on low-quality or even search engine-banned resources can lead to a drop in your site’s positions. In this way, a resource can even be “hit by a filter” — a special algorithm that removes from search results sites that use low-quality or incorrect promotion methods.

Sometimes such dishonest methods (placing backlinks on “black” resources) are used by competitors who try to remove another company’s website from search results this way. But fortunately, algorithms are improving all the time, and now it’s not so easy to harm a competitor’s site by placing a few backlinks to it on shady forums or portals.

However, SEO specialists are very selective when it comes to choosing where to place a backlink. Each potential donor (the resource where the backlink will be placed) must be manually evaluated according to these parameters:

1. Relevance to the topic. Want to place backlinks on a windshield wiper site? A women’s portal about cosmetics is unlikely to be suitable. Choose resources that are as relevant as possible to the promoted link.
2. Platform popularity (number of unique daily visitors). The site’s traffic plays an important role in ranking. The more visitors stay on the chosen information platform and read its articles — the better.
3. Ratio of outgoing and incoming backlinks. The greater the difference in favor of outgoing links, the higher the risk for this resource to fall under a spam filter. By placing a backlink on such a platform, you risk attracting low-quality traffic and raising suspicions from search engines in the future.
4. Age of the platform. The older — the better. It’s not very advantageous to leave your links on projects whose domain age is less than one year. However, if you know for sure that this site has good prospects, is gradually “growing,” and along with it your backlink’s weight also “grows,” then leaving a backlink there may be beneficial both in terms of price and future potential.
5. Presence of search engine sanctions. Has the project been hit by a filter? If so, placing a backlink on such a platform will only harm your site.

Note that the higher the quality indicators for each of these points, the more “weight” your backlink will have. That is, its measurable significance will be higher.

How to Check Backlinks to a Website?

Very often, attempts to quickly increase the backlink profile by purchasing a large number of backlinks from any available platforms lead to a sharp drop in website rankings in search engines or even getting the online resource under one of the filters. Therefore, it is very important to regularly check your site’s backlinks for quality and promptly remove bad links. If you want to know how to find external links to your site, start by analyzing all backlinks using reliable SEO tools.

The list of low-quality links usually includes backlinks from donors with a high level of spamminess, as well as:

• backlinks whose topics do not match the topic of the donor site;
• links that contain commercial anchor texts and a large number of high-frequency keywords;
• sitewide backlinks.

Additionally, this list includes links leading to suspicious websites, as well as links from a network of sites with the same IP address.

You can check backlinks to a site and also find out their number using these services:

• Ahrefs
• Google Search Console
• Serpstat

When analyzing the quality of backlinks, such indicators as domain age, its rating and authority, indexing in search engines, and other important metrics are taken into account. If low-quality backlinks are detected, it is strongly not recommended to remove them all at once. Remember that search engines react negatively to sudden or massive changes. Remove them gradually, replace poor-quality links with good ones, or simply close them from indexing.

Where to Buy Backlinks?

There are many ways to get backlinks. Here are two of the most popular and effective ones:

1. Purchase
   Using exchanges or by directly negotiating with the relevant resource, an SEO specialist pays an agreed or fixed price for a link. In 90% of cases, this will be an advertising or informational article with an organically inserted link to the desired page. Before deciding where to buy links for your site, make sure the platform meets all necessary requirements (topic relevance, domain age, absence of sanctions, etc.).
2. Crowd Marketing
   This is mostly a free way to leave mentions of your site on relevant platforms. To do this, comments with a link to your project are left on forums, discussions, information portals, and so on. However, there is no guarantee that comment links will not be deleted or closed in noindex/nofollow over time. Nevertheless, this method works and should not be neglected. If you don’t know how to get crowd-links for your site, crowd marketing involves carefully inserting links into relevant discussions where your resource will be useful for the audience.

How Do You Know You Need Backlinks?

To figure this out, answer the following questions:

1. Do you have your own website?
2. Does your site have a commercial purpose? Do you aim to profit from it?
3. Are you promoting it in search engines?
4. Are you dissatisfied with your promotion results?
5. Do you want to improve your site’s positions, increase traffic and orders?

If you answered “yes” to at least three out of five questions, any SEO specialist will point out that you need backlinks. At least because it’s truly an effective method. Of course, not as a full substitute for comprehensive website promotion but as an additional source for strengthening and growing your resource’s positive reputation in search engines.

And if you don’t have time to dive into all these SEO details or are afraid of making mistakes, order website promotion from trusted professionals. We will do everything properly!