What Are Backlinks, and Why Do They Actually Matter?

A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. If a health blog links to your site as a source, or a local news outlet mentions your business with a link, that's a backlink. On its own, that sounds unremarkable — but backlinks are one of the strongest signals search engines use to decide how much to trust a website.

Why search engines care about links at all

Think of a backlink as a vote of confidence. If several relevant, well-regarded websites link to yours, search engines treat that as evidence your site is a credible source worth showing to searchers. A site with no backlinks has to rely entirely on its own content to prove its authority — which is possible, but much slower, especially in competitive industries.

Not all backlinks are equal

This is where most confusion happens. A link from a well-known, topically relevant publication in your industry is worth far more than dozens of links from random, unrelated, low-quality sites. In fact, a large volume of poor-quality links can actively hurt your rankings rather than help them, because it looks manipulative rather than earned.

What actually matters for a backlink's value:

• Relevance — does the linking site relate to your industry or topic?
• Authority — is the linking site itself trusted and well-established?
• Context — is the link placed naturally within real content, not stuffed into a footer or sidebar?

Where bad backlinks come from

Most businesses don't set out to build harmful links — they accumulate over time from old marketing campaigns, previous agencies using outdated tactics, directory spam, or even competitors pointing low-quality links at a site deliberately. If you've inherited an older website, or changed SEO providers before, it's worth checking what's actually linking to you.

A backlink profile is a bit like a credit history — a few strong, relevant references help enormously; a pile of low-quality ones can quietly work against you.

How harmful backlinks are fixed

When a toxic link can't simply be requested for removal, site owners can file a disavow request with Google, telling it explicitly not to count that link toward the site's authority. This isn't something to do casually or automatically — done incorrectly, it can remove links that were actually helping. It typically follows a proper backlink audit, not guesswork (see our disavow and link cleanup process for how this works in practice).

The takeaway

Backlinks aren't about chasing a number — "we got you 100 links this month" means very little without knowing where those links came from. A handful of genuinely relevant, editorially earned links will do more for a website's long-term authority than a large batch of low-quality ones ever will.