Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks on one website that point to a page on another website. Search engines, particularly Google, use backlinks as a significant ranking signal. The logic is that if credible, relevant websites are linking to your content, it is likely to be useful and trustworthy. Not all backlinks carry equal weight: a link from a respected industry publication or a high-authority domain counts for more than a link from an obscure or irrelevant site. The quality, relevance, and diversity of your backlink profile all factor into your domain authority and your ability to rank for competitive search terms.
Building backlinks is a core component of search engine optimisation (SEO). The most sustainable approach is to create content that other sites genuinely want to reference: original research, comprehensive guides, tools, data-driven insights, and thought leadership pieces. Outreach, guest posting, and digital PR are also common tactics. What does not work, and can actively harm your site, is acquiring low-quality or spammy links through link schemes.
For B2B content marketers, backlinks have a compounding effect. A single high-quality backlink to a glossary page or cornerstone piece of content can meaningfully improve that page’s ranking, drive referral traffic directly from the linking site, and lift the overall authority of your domain, which benefits all of your pages. This is one of the reasons that publishing genuinely useful, linkable content, such as this glossary, is a long-term SEO investment rather than a short-term tactic.
What is the difference between a dofollow and nofollow backlink?
A dofollow backlink passes ‘link equity’ or ‘PageRank’ from the linking page to the destination, contributing to the destination page’s search authority. A nofollow link includes an HTML attribute that tells search engines not to pass this equity, so it has less direct SEO value. Nofollow links are common in user-generated content, paid placements, and editorial situations where the publisher does not want to endorse the destination. While nofollow links do not directly boost rankings, they can still drive referral traffic and contribute to a natural-looking link profile.
How many backlinks do I need to rank well?
There is no magic number. What matters is the quality and relevance of the links relative to your competition for a given search term. A single highly authoritative backlink from a respected publication in your niche can outweigh dozens of low-quality links. The best approach is to analyse the backlink profiles of the pages currently ranking for your target terms and aim to build a comparable or stronger profile through consistent content and outreach effort.
Can backlinks from my own website help SEO?
Internal links, which are links between pages within your own website, are valuable for site architecture and for distributing authority across your pages, but they are different from external backlinks. Internal links help search engines understand how your content is structured and which pages are most important. External backlinks from other domains are what primarily contribute to your domain authority and competitive ranking ability.