A backlink is a link on someone else’s website that points to a page on your website. If a regional newspaper writes about your bakery and links to your site, that link is a backlink to you.
How backlinks work
Search engines discover pages partly by following links, and they have long treated a link as a kind of vote: if other sites point to a page, it probably has something worth seeing. Google’s original method for scoring this, PageRank, still underpins how value passes between pages, although it is now one signal among hundreds.
Not every backlink counts the same. Three things matter most. Relevance: a link from a UK trade association in your sector says more about you than one from an unrelated directory. Trust: a link from an established site with real readers carries more weight than one from a site that exists only to sell links. Context: a link inside a paragraph that discusses your work tells search engines more than a link buried in a footer or a list of hundreds.
The words used in the link, the anchor text, help describe the destination page. Some links carry an attribute such as nofollow, sponsored or ugc, which tells Google not to treat them as a full endorsement. They can still send visitors, and a natural link profile includes some.
SEO tools usually count backlinks in two ways: total links, and referring domains, meaning the number of separate websites linking to you. Ten links from ten relevant sites are generally worth more than a hundred links from one.
Why it matters
Two pages with equally good content compete partly on the signals around them, and links are one of the strongest. For a small UK business, a handful of genuine local and sector links often makes the difference between page two and page one for competitive service searches. Links also send referral visitors, and a link from a respected source builds trust with the people who click it.
The good sources are usually close to home: your suppliers’ stockist pages, your local chamber of commerce, sector bodies you belong to, the council’s business directory, sponsorship of a local club, coverage in local and trade press, and podcasts or events where you have spoken.
Common mistakes
- Buying links or paying for “guest posts” on sites that sell placements to anyone. Google treats links bought to pass ranking value as spam, and a manual action can demote some or all of your pages until the links are dealt with.
- Chasing a domain score from a third-party tool rather than relevance. A high score on an unrelated site is worth little.
- Building every link to the homepage with the same keyword in the anchor, which looks engineered.
- Panicking over spammy links you did not build. Google ignores most of them; a disavow file is for genuine, large-scale problems.
- Letting links break when you rebuild a site and change URLs without redirects, which throws away links you already earned.
How to act on it
First, see what you have. The Links report in Google Search Console lists the sites that link to you, and it is free. Check that the pages those links point to still load; if any return an error, redirect them to the closest live page.
Next, list the relationships you already have but have not turned into links: suppliers, partners, associations, local organisations, people who have reviewed or recommended you. Ask politely and specifically. Then create one or two things on your site worth citing, such as a useful guide, original data from your own work, or a clear local resource, and tell the people who would genuinely use it. If you want help planning and running this safely, my link building service follows that approach, with digital PR for businesses that have a story worth telling.