How Important Are Backlinks for SEO?

Have you ever felt that some of your competitors who have way less backlinks than you have outnumbering you on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)? Along with this question, there are a few more sub questions that we will be discussing in the coming sections. Before going deep into the topic, let’s discuss certain common questions that are prevailing in the SEO community.

How Important are Backlinks as Ranking Factors?

Are Backlinks Important for SEO?

Is getting thousands of links from one site considered spam?

Let’s start off with the second question.

Is Getting Thousands of Links from One Site Considered Spam?

It depends on the situation whether it will be considered as spam or not. One of the main determining factors is if the search engine sees it as natural vs. paid or a deliberate attempt at trying to get backlinks.

Natural links include:

• If you’re an authority and a blogger has a list of resources and other reading in their sidebar.
• As you do something newsworthy and media companies, bloggers, and publications mention, source or feature you for it.
• Companies that link to their other brands in their own footers or in their main navigation to switch between stores.
• When you’re producing a ton of photo content and the website uses your work across numerous posts.

Unnatural:

• Providing databases and feeds to sell products on other sites that link to your site.
• Having bloggers or publishers create a store without “sponsored” or “nofollow” attributes on their links.
• Leaving comments on blogs, in forums, or on community websites.
• Keyword-rich links to category pages or products that you do not manufacture.
• Banner ads – run of site, category, etc., because they are paid placements.
• If the site is part of a PBN (private blog network) regardless if you paid or earned the links.
• Using scholarships and other gimmicks.
• Widgets, feeds, and badges with keyword-rich backlinks.
• Widgets, feeds, and badges that are clearly marketing ploys and not something exclusive or real.
• Anything that isn’t clearly earned by merit.

These are just a few examples. So, it is both yes and no. These links might be seen as spam at times and may not be seen as spam as well. Also, it depends on the links, your relationship with the website, and whether they are natural or not. Let’s now discuss the first question.

Are Backlinks Important for SEO?

Yes, backlinks are very crucial for SEO, but it is more of a qualitative metric than quantitative metric. Suppose one of your competitors is beating out national brands without many links and even rank above the governing body for their industry for that governing body’s own trademark terms. The quality of the links your competitor acquired helped, but they started ranking high based on their website structure, quality content, the page rendering speed, and site structure before we got the first links.

Backlinks are only one of the metrics a search engine uses to rank your website. The entire purpose of a search engine is to give answers to a user searching the most relevant response, formatted in the best way possible to and in the fastest and most accessible way. That could be a paragraph or a list of text, a video, images, or various other media formats. This is equally if not more important than backlinks.

Why a Site with Less Backlinks Outranks a Site with More?

Before answering the question why a site with fewer links outranks a site with a ton, or how to get your website with a few links to outrank one with a few hundred thousand, you need to understand what a link is.

Before the advent of smartphones, schema, and concepts, such as E-A-T, the search engines needed a way to determine the trustworthiness of a website and a specific page within that website. Backlinks were one of the factors influencing the trustworthiness of a website.

Though PageRank doesn’t exist now, there are other ways to help build the trust and authority of your website. If your website and a specific page from your website meet the trust and authority signals, you may now have the ability to compete with the website and webpages that have more links.

• You can build trust by having licensed and credible people in the niche create or sign off on your content.
• Have a resourceful internal linking structure that provides more explanations for concepts & resources mentioned in your content.
• Ensure your website has SSL certification (i.e. secure).
• Source the content to the author and relevant sources using links and schema.
• Provide a better explanation of the concept, formulate an easier way to convert, or have better formatting that is easier to digest.

You can also:

• Be as ADA-compliant as possible (the more people that can access your content, the better the experience for everyone giving search engines a reason to show your page over another).

• Add a proper schema to define what is on the page and in each section.
• Have a fast loading website so people on mobile devices and slow connections can access your content.
• Properly structure your content using:
• Header tags.
• Concise titles.
• Properly named images.
• The formatting of sections into tables, lists, paragraphs, etc.
• Use proper site structure and make sure the important pages of your websites are being referenced when it is natural.

Now that search engines like Google are doubling down including cumulative layout shift (CLS), check your Core Web Vitals periodically.

Wrapping Up

Of course, quality backlinks will help you rank more easily than merit alone, but there are things you can do while you begin acquiring links so that you can beat a website or webpage that has 10X or 100X the amount of links you do.

We, at TechAffinity, have expert digital marketers who are well versed in generating quality backlinks for businesses. Feel free to send your queries to media@techaffinity.com or schedule a meeting with our experts.