Why Do Backlinks Improve Your SEO? Google

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Why Do Backlinks Improve Your SEO?
Google (and other search engines) can “crawl” the web by following links. Each link to your site from another site is like a vote for your site, telling Google that your site is interesting or useful. This means it’s going to get higher priority in the Google rankings.

Imagine two different websites. One has just 5 backlinks from other sites. The other has 500 backlinks.

You can see why Google would prioritize the site with 500 backlinks in search results. It’s much more likely to be well-established and reputable. So backlinks are one of Google’s key ranking factors.

Now, this might bring up an obvious problem: what if someone unscrupulous started a scammy website, got their friends to add links to it from their scammy websites, gaming the system to bring in lots of organic traffic that they don’t deserve?

Luckily, Google is smart enough to recognize this problem! And that leads us on to…

What is a High Quality Backlink vs Low Quality Backlink?
Let’s say your website has a number of backlinks from different sites. You might think that each is a single vote—but actually, Google’s algorithm weights the backlinks differently depending on where they come from.

If you have a backlink from an authoritative website, like a government site, national newspaper, or major publication like Forbes or Time, then that’s going to count for a lot.

If you have a backlink from your friend’s blog that they started last week, that’s not going to count for much.

And if you have a backlink from a site that Google knows is full of dodgy scammers… then that’s definitely not going to count in your favor. In fact, it’s almost definitely going to hurt your site in the long run.

Google has a special system called “domain authority” where it rates domains out of 100 on how authoritative they are. Moz has a free tool that lets you check any site’s domain authority here.

When you’re focused on getting backlinks, you want to build high quality backlinks.

That includes:

Links from websites with high authority—ideally, a domain authority of 50 or above.
Links from well-established websites that are relevant to your website (e.g. from other blogs in your niche).
Links from official websites, like .gov or .edu domains—though these can be hard to get.
Can Low Quality Backlinks Damage Your Website?
Yes, absolutely. Low quality backlinks come from spammy and irrelevant websites or forums. Alternatively, they might be from sites that you’ve paid to link to you—like link mills or link schemes. Google is not excited about either of these, as you might imagine.