What Is a Backlink, and Is It Actually Worth Chasing?

A backlink is a link on someone else's website that points back to yours.

That's basically all it is: another site decided to mention you and linked across rather than just naming you in text. Google, and every other search engine, has been using these links as one of its ranking signals since the very early days, on the logic that if enough other sites are willing to point at your page, it's probably a good thing!

Why backlinks carry weight

The original idea behind ranking pages by their links was pretty straightforward: a link is a bit like a recommendation. If a website you trust points somewhere else, that's a small signal that the destination is worth trusting too. If you stack up enough of those friendly signals from a range of different sites then search engines start treating your page as more credible than one that nobody else has bothered to link to.

It's not really a numbers game

Google pays far more attention to how many different websites are linking to you, known as referring domains, than to your total backlink count, and it weighs the quality and relevance of those sites heavily too. A single mention from a trade publication, a respected supplier, or a well established local directory will do more for you than fifty links scattered across blogs nobody reads. I think a lot of business owners have been sold the idea that backlinks are a straightforward numbers game, buy enough and you'll climb the rankings, and that's an oversimplification that's led people to waste money on paying for 'services' that do nothing useful at all.  Quality over quantity every day!

Watch out...

Because backlinks matter, an entire industry has sprung up selling them, and most of it is worth avoiding. Links bought in bulk from low quality directories or link farms don't just fail to help, they can actively drag your rankings down if Google decides the pattern looks manipulative. The safer route is slower and less glamorous: getting mentioned by suppliers, industry bodies, local press, or other businesses you genuinely work with - these are the ones search engines trust. A spammy link will always be a spammy link...

Where this comes up in practice

Use your network, get in a directory, build those links back to your site (over time) and you'll see it starts to pay off. Make them real, relatable and relevant and people will actually click them and Google (or AI) will start to trust them too.

AI & Backlinks

Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews handle backlinks a bit differently to traditional search. They rarely look at your backlink profile directly when deciding what to cite. Instead, they tend to pull their answers from whoever's already ranking well in ordinary Google search, so a solid backlink profile still helps, it just works one step removed rather than being read by the AI itself.

What's newer is that these tools also pay attention to how often you're mentioned across the web even without a link back to you, on places like Reddit, review sites, or trade press. Getting talked about is starting to matter almost as much as getting linked to, which is a real change after two decades of link building being the main game in town.  Better start getting chatty!!!