Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent another website's traffic coming to your own site. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines such as Google. This is because your backlinks are considered an indicator of how popular your website is with users. Implementing, managing, and analyzing the performance of backlinks is an important aspect of SEO strategies.

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Individual documents on the web interconnect via links—they’re the glue that holds the web together. Internal links are links between web pages on the same domain, and they primarily exist to help people navigate the website. External links connect to web pages on other domains and have a wider range of possible intentions.

• Provide wider context to the reader

• Support a claim made in the copy

• Cite or provide a source

• Recommend something

• Add authenticity

In each case, the link is on the page to provide additional value to the reader, so the outgoing link is a valuable asset. It’s key to understand that the link has a direction. When it’s outgoing on the linking webpage, it’s incoming to the target page. Therefore, this is a backlink to the target page.

Search engines recognize that the backlink has value and reward the target URL, interpreting the link as fully intentional; they assume there’s been some level of editorial assessment of the target webpage.

That’s why backlinks that point to your website indicate to search engines that your content has value. In fact, backlinks are one of the most powerful ranking factors. They play a huge role in the success (or failure) of every website when it comes to organic search traffic.

One of the main reasons Google is the dominant search engine is because it was the first to realize the importance of backlinks. When Google launched in 1998, it used a revolutionary algorithm for ranking web pages based on link popularity—meaning a page ranks higher if there are more links to it.

This algorithm, named “PageRank” after Larry Page (co-founder of Google, along with Sergey Brin), doesn’t just compute the number of links a given webpage receives; it also measures the authority of those links.

This means that not all backlinks are equal. Imagine one of the pages on your website has a backlink from 2 web pages on different external domains:

• Page A has 200 backlinks

• Page B has 20 backlinks

If these 2 pages were about the same topic, Page A would likely rank higher than Page B. This is because Page A would be more authoritative due to the fact that it has 10 times as many links.

In terms of these 2 backlinks to your site, the link from Page A is more valuable than the link from Page B because it has a higher authority.

Essentially, the PageRank algorithm assigns an authority value to each webpage based on the quantity and quality of its incoming links.

PageRank is an iterative algorithm. This means the data gets computed, feeds back into itself, and then needs to be rerun through many iterations before it stabilizes.

This is because the relative authority of all the pages in a given network depend on one another. For example, imagine a network of 4 pages.

• Page A links to Page B and Page C and has a backlink from Page B

• Page B links to Page A and Page D and has backlinks from Page A and Page C

• Page C links to Page B and Page D and has a backlink from Page A

• Page D does not link out but has backlinks from Page B and Page C

In order to calculate the authority passed to Page D, we first need to know the authority of Page B and Page C. But the authority of Page B is dependent on Page A and Page C, and the authority of Page A itself is dependent on Page B.

You can see how even a simple network can become complex quickly. It’s only by iterating through the calculations again and again that the solution presents itself. The math is not that complicated, but the size of the dataset (the trillions of links across the entire internet) and the amount of computation required make it a huge task.

Although accurately calculating the exact value of link authority is a very opaque and complex task, knowing how PageRank works provides some basic rules of thumb.

• You want to attract as many backlinks as you can.

• It’s better to get backlinks from authoritative websites.

• You can use your intuition to determine if a website looks authoritative.

• Attracting more backlinks will have a positive effect on your entire website.

In short, you want both quality and quantity when it comes to backlinks.

Once you’ve done what you can for on-page optimization, building backlinks to your site is the most valuable thing you can do to improve your rankings.

Unfortunately, it’s one of the most difficult tasks in SEO. To get a link, you need to convince someone else that they can improve a web page on their site by linking to a web page on your site.

It’s inadvisable to email random people and ask them to link to you. Instead, there are more professional best practices to get backlinks to your site.

A nofollow link, or backlink, is a link which does not pass authority on to the website it is linking to. These links do not help in terms of SEO. To make a link nofollow, add rel=”nofollow” to the code when linking to a website.

When a website links to another website, there are two ways the website can be linked. The first way being a dofollow link, and the second way being a nofollow link. Although both types of links achieve the same goal of linking from the origin site to the destination site, they tell the search engine two different things. Let’s discuss the differences between, and the use cases for dofollow and nofollow backlinks.

A dofollow link is a link that helps in terms of SEO by passing the authority of the origin site to the destination site. This passing of authority is called, “link juice.” Acquiring dofollow backlinks will help improve a website’s domain authority, or domain rating, which in turn, helps to improve keyword ranking. By default, links are dofollow, so there is no need for rel=”dofollow” when linking to a website.

A nofollow link, or backlink, is a link which does not pass authority on to the website it is linking to. These links do not help in terms of SEO. To make a link nofollow, add rel=”nofollow” to the code when linking to a website.

A nofollow backlink should be used when you do not want to pass link juice to, or endorse the linked website.

For example, nofollow backlinks were first recognized by search engines in 2005 when comment spam became an issue. Webmasters were able to make links in the comment fields nofollow so the website wouldn’t benefit from spamming comments with links. Other situations where you might want to use a nofollow link would be for sponsored links, affiliate links, or user-generated content.

No! Acquiring nofollow links is not a bad thing. Although you do not get the full SEO benefits of a dofollow link, nofollow links can generate traffic to your website, as well as diversify your backlink portfolio. A natural backlink profile consists of a distribution of both dofollow and nofollow backlinks.

Dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks are two ways of identifying a link and telling search engines how to associate the website you are linking to your website. Dofollow links are a way to pass on authority to a website, while a nofollow link does not pass on link juice.