When providing SEO services for many different clients, we are often asked what we do about building backlinks. This is a brief summary of our methodology, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on backlinks in SEO.
Are Backlinks Good For SEO?
It has been claimed for many years that good quality backlinks are a ranking factor for Google. The more you have, and the better the links are, the better your rankings will be – many SEO specialists believe that backlinks are regarded as a vote of trust in your website.
But is this true? Sure, top-ranking sites will likely have lots of backlinks but we also propose an alternative theory to explain the correlation between links and rank position.
Regardless of how much you believe in the power of backlinks for SEO, common sense would suggest that Google ultimately wants to see naturally created backlinks, not artificially created links.
If it’s possible for a site owner or SEO agency to build links purely for the purpose of ranking higher, Google will ultimately want to either penalise this practice or discount the value of links in assessing how to rank a website.
The commonly held belief that backlinks are good for SEO leads to the desire to try to create more of them, but this has two distinct pitfalls to avoid:
- If Google deems them to be artificial, there is a risk they will apply a penalty, and you will be worse off than if you had not created them.
- The time or money spent in creating them could have been used to improve other areas of the website that would have had a bigger and more obvious impact.
The extract below from a Semrush top ranking factors study in 2024 shows only 2 backlink-related ranking factors within the top 10 they identified, and none within the top 5.
Our theory is that backlinks often come as a result of top rankings, but rarely the other way round.
What Do UClimb Do About Backlinks?
Firstly, when we audit a new client or website, we scan and check for toxic backlinks. These are links to sites that are known to be bad and could potentially damage your rankings or reputation. These can then be disavowed by Google, to prevent any harm.
Secondly, on commencing an SEO overhaul of the site, we would check that the company is listed on 15 or 20 of the most common, reputable, online directories – this is a simple and sustainable source of verified backlinks.
After that, we focus on all the other aspects of SEO, such keyword mapping, creating excellent content, good user experience, and keeping the technical side of the site tip-top. We leave a link-tracking widget running on our SEO client dashboard, just in case we need to monitor an unusual trend, but to date, we have found that excellent ranking increases don’t depend on efforts in backlink creation. Read our article on On Page SEO for a summary of effective SEO methods that don’t require link building.
What Do Google Say About Backlinks?
Even in recent years, Google have indicated that backlinks do help in some way. For example, in 2019 they stated that no follow links would be treated as hints.
However, in their most up to date Google Search Central guidelines on SEO Link Best Practices, they interestingly don’t mention backlinks at all, only internal links and external links (links out from your own content).
A search of the Google Search Central knowledgebase only pulls up articles on internal links, outbound links, and articles on spammy link practices to avoid:
In April 2024, at a major search conference, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links to rank websites, and the SEO community seem to be increasingly catching on to this concept, see this SEJ article.
Backlink Case Studies
To illustrate the impact backlinks have on SEO in recent years, here are 2 client examples:
Case Study 1: Rank Increases Without Link Building
We’ll start with Encompass, a client that outranked major established firms like Lloyds Pharmacy and Boots for competitive covid test kit keywords with 1000s of monthly searches, within just 6 months of the website going live. During the first 6 months of their campaign we built less than 5 backlinks, all of these were from simple online directories like yell.com – our SEO focus was instead on content and technical SEO which seemed to pay off (the green sections on the graph below represent page 1 rankings, with dark green being keywords at positions 1-3 on page 1):
To learn more about this specific project for Encompass, view the full story here: An Intense SEO Campaign That Went Wrong – At First
Case Study 2: Rank Decreases Due To Link Building
Next, let’s take a look at AURA Architecture. During early 2020 we decided that there must be some truth in all the online articles proclaiming the value of backlinks, so did try to build backlinks from any relevant blogs we could find, doing a specific focus on building links to 2 key pages that the client particularly wanted on the first page of Google.
However, we quickly realised that the pages that were performing best were the ones that we were not building links to, and in contrast, the pages that had new backlinks pointing to them were dropping in rank, in spite of the links being built from apparently reputable blog sites with reasonably high domain authority ratings on Moz.
Therefore we abandoned the link-building part of their SEO campaign, and as you can see on the graph below, their rankings really took off from early-2020, which is the point when we stopped building back-links – the green section on the graph represents page 1 rankings (keywords in positions 1-10), which increase from 23 in January 2020 to 53 in December 2020, and reach 93 by December 2021:
Our Theory On Why Top Ranking Sites Have The Most Backlinks
An online search about the value of link building for SEO will quickly pull up lots of articles and well-researched studies that seem to indicate a definite relationship between the number of high-authority links a page has and its rank position.
Most of these articles then conclude that having lots of links from authoritative websites is a significant reason why these websites rank higher than sites with fewer links pointing to them.
However, we have an alternative theory to suggest…
As outlined clearly on this ahrefs study, top-ranking pages gather links more quickly than lower-ranking pages. This makes total sense because when you’re writing content and looking for a supporting article to link out to, you typically search the topic on hand and choose one of the top-ranking articles, both for convenience and because you naturally assume that these are most relevant.
Because ahrefs believe in the common assumption that inbound links are also a significant ranking factor, they then go on to talk about the “vicious circle of SEO”, a theory that top-ranking websites get more links (which is undeniable and perfectly logical) which then makes them rank higher (which is the bit we’re not so sure about).
In our experience, it’s perfectly possible for a website with great content and sound technical SEO to outrank websites that have a high domain authority, see below example showing the domain authority of websites on page 1 of Google that rank when you search “nose only covid text kits vs nose and throat test kits”.
You can clearly see that our client’s website, who’s Moz domain authority score is just 11/100, is outranking sites with domain authority scores of over 90/100, e.g. the NHS website and gov.uk:
When Backlinks Do Clearly Help SEO – The Exception To The Rule
One kind of backlink still seems to help SEO in 2024 – backlinks that drive referral traffic.
It has long been known that website traffic is a potential ranking factor – an in-depth study by Semrush in 2017 put direct website visits right at the top of the list, and a more recent Semrush study in January 2024 put organic traffic to the page and organic traffic to the domain as the 2nd and 3rd most important ranking factors.
While the Semrush studies don’t pick up on the importance of referral traffic, in our experience we’ve often seen a boost to rankings when there’s an increase in referral traffic to our client’s websites.
See the below extract from the Semrush 2017 study:
See the below extract from the Semrush 2024 study:
Therefore we reckon that if links can be built from popular articles on high-traffic websites, these should help your Google rankings, for as long as they continue to drive traffic. If the backlink article’s popularity (and therefore its potential to drive traffic to your website) declines, the ranking boost will be lost.
Conclusion
Our current theory is that when you see graphs ‘proving’ the relationship between Domain Authority and rank position, it doesn’t prove anything because people tend to build links to the top ranking articles, so having a good domain authority is a symptom of ranking high, not (necessarily) a cause.
Also, to be clear: we do like authoritative links pointing to our client’s sites, as they drive traffic, and brand recognition, and may also help their rankings. What we don’t like is time wasted building links that don’t help.
As always, we remain curious and open-minded and are willing to have this theory disproved, but to date, the evidence from our client campaigns has only validated the theory.
Google’s ranking algorithm evolves over time, so we’re on the lookout for further changes over the coming months, and we will continue to adapt our efforts to deliver top-ranking results for our clients.
