What are backlinks?

The short answer

When one website links to a page on another website, that link is a backlink (also called an inbound link or incoming link). If a Sydney news site links to your homepage, you have earned a backlink from that news site. Search engines like Google count these links as votes: the more credible sites that link to you, the more trustworthy your page appears. It is one of the oldest and most durable ranking factors in search.

The anatomy of a link

Every backlink has a few parts worth knowing:

• The source page; the page that contains the link. Its authority and topical relevance shape how much the link is worth.
• The destination; your page, the one receiving the link.
• The anchor text; the clickable words that hold the link. Anchor text gives search engines a hint about what your page is about.
• The link attribute; an optional rel value such as nofollow, sponsored or ugc that tells search engines how to treat the link.

Dofollow vs nofollow

A dofollow link is the default. It passes ranking signals, sometimes called link equity or link juice, from the source page to yours. A nofollow link includes rel="nofollow", which historically told Google not to pass that equity. Two related attributes exist: sponsored for paid or affiliate links, and ugc for user-generated content like comments.

Do not dismiss nofollow links. They still send referral traffic, build brand awareness, and keep your link profile looking natural; no real website earns only dofollow links. They also feed the brand mentions that AI answer engines pay attention to.

Referring domains vs total backlinks

If one blog links to you fifty times, that is fifty backlinks but only one referring domain. Search engines care far more about the number of unique referring domains than the raw link total. Fifty links from fifty different trusted sites is a vastly stronger signal than fifty links from one. When you measure your profile, watch referring domains first.