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Getting another website to link to yours.

Links act like votes. Another site linking at you signals to Google that your page must be good enough for them to send someone there.

The theory is simple. Executing effectively is the hard part.

Unlike most link building guides out there, if you’re just starting from scratch make sure you read our guide on what are backlinks & how to get them first, before jumping down into the nitty-gritty below.

Yes they bloody well do. And if anything the importance has increased, rather than decreased.

Both in Google’s algorithms and in the AI search engines that sit on top of them.

A page without links struggles to earn trust signals from Google. And a page Google trusts does not get ignored by AI systems either.

What has shifted is the way those links need to look. Old school volume plays generate almost nothing today.

One link from a proper publication will beat 50 x directory submissions every day of the week.

Our guide to backlink benefits for SEO covers where you’ll see the biggest impact on rankings, including some areas entirely outside of Google’s algorithm.

Backlinks are individual links. Ref Domains are unique websites those links originate from.

So 50 links from the same blog gives you one referring domain. Which will rank far lower on any quality metric than 50 links from 50 different sites.

There’s a second reason to prioritise referring domains over links.

Most of the value from any given site comes from the first link.

The second helps. The third a little less. By link number 10 it’s trading value for quantity.

Healthy link building results in gradual referring domain growth. If a vendor promises you X number of backlinks and never mentions referring domains, they’re selling quantity, not quality.

Dofollow links allow authority to flow to the page they’re attached to.

No-follow has a tag attached telling Google not to pass any authority.

To be clear, Google only partially listen to that tag these days. Since 2019 they treat it like a suggestion, rather than a command.

If you get enough nofollow links from genuinely good sites though, Google may still count them anyway.

There’s still value in nofollow links.

They still send referral traffic. They still put your brand in front of real people. They still create the kind of citation footprint that AI systems crawl.

Remember though: real websites have a mix of dofollow and nofollow backlinks.

If all the links in your profile are dofollow Google assumes someone is manipulating them. You should too. Build yourself a natural link profile.

That means having some nofollow links too.

Authority that passes from one page to another when a link is clicked.

The amount isn’t fixed. It depends on how many other links sit on that page alongside yours.

Six outbound links? Everyone gets a decent share. Two hundred? You get crumbs. Same site. Same authority. Very different link.

Then it weakens again with every hop. Site A to Site B is strong. Site B passing it along to Site C is weaker. By Site D there’s nothing left worth counting.

And this is where internal linking earns its keep.

If high equity pages are linking to your homepage but there are no links anywhere else on your site, Google doesn’t care. Link equity needs a reason to flow downhill.

As many as the competition already has.

How many referring domains are on the pages currently ranking for your keyword? That’s your bar.

If you’re targeting a low competition long tail keyword it might be 5.

If you’re after a commercial head term you might be looking at several hundred built up over many years.

Anyone that tries to give you an arbitrary number as an answer is wasting your time. They’re trying to sell you services, not help you identify your gap.

Head over to our guide about how many backlinks do you need to rank and we’ll show you how to calculate your own target based on actual search data.

Pages and people that link to you.

That authority shows up in a few ways. Links obviously. Unlinked mentions. Brand searches.

It’s now also showing up inside AI answers in the form of citations.

Domain Authority and Domain Rating are the two best known estimations of a websites authority but the truth is no tool gets it right.

Like most SEO topics it comes down to building the reality first.

Work on earning more credible links and the scores will start moving for you.

Focus too hard on the scores themselves and you’ll be stuck playing a numbers game that impresses clients but never ranks.