What is a backlink?

Backlink is a term often used in the SEO community to describe any incoming links to a website. This means that whenever a site creates a hyperlink connecting it to another site, it creates a backlink.

They are a ubiquitous term in search engine optimization due to their significance then and now.

It used to be that backlinks were the number one metric used by search engines to rank websites. The assumption was that if many sites were pointing to a particular one, that site held valuable information that people would like to see. Thus, pages with a lot of backlinks tended to rank higher on all major search engines. Google included.

While search algorithms have significantly evolved since then, backlinks remain an essential piece of the optimization game, and a lot of SEO’s terminology reflects it.

Popular Backlink nomenclature, tied to SEO

• Link Juice: A popular phrase used in this context, it denotes a site conveying credibility and relevance when it links to another. It is often seen in the context of domain authority.
• No-follow Links: It refers to backlinks that use the HTML “no-follow” tag. This tag instructs WebCrawler’s not to index the destination of the link, thus not conveying any “link juice.”
• Internal Links: Links that point to other parts of the same site.
• Low-quality Links: It refers to backlinks that come from undesirable sites. Pages like harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites, or even porn sites can fall on this category.
• Anchor texts: Refers to the words used to place a hyperlink on.

All these things carry weight in the optimization game and are relevant to anyone wanting to have their site ranking higher in SERPs.