What is Backlink?

Backlinks are votes of confidence: when another site links to your page, it tells Google someone else considered your page worth referencing. Not all backlinks are equal — links from high-authority sites (.edu, established media, well-ranked competitors) carry far more weight than spam directories or paid link farms. Google's algorithms aggressively discount low-quality links and can penalize manipulative link building. The reliable path: create content people genuinely want to reference (definitive guides, original data, useful tools), and links accumulate organically. Internal links — pointing from one page on your site to another — don't pass the same authority but are crucial for crawl + topical-clustering signals.