Links

Backlink

inbound link · incoming link

Definition

Backlink is a hyperlink from a page on someone else’s site to a page on yours. Search engines treat some of those links as votes that a URL is worth retrieving. Digital PR treats the editorial backlink as the durable residue of a story: the clip may age, the link can keep working if the publisher leaves it alone.

Not every pointer is a backlink. A name-only mention has no href. A citation inside ChatGPT is not a backlink. A link wrapped in rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" still sends a person through; it is a weaker ranking signal by design. A link you paid for and dressed up as a news story is a policy problem, not a prize.

How it is measured

Count links and then collapse them to referring domains. One homepage with 40 links to you is one domain. Note the target URL, the anchor text, follow status, and whether the page is still indexed. New referring domains from relevant publishers beat raw link count from comment spam.

Example: a fintech data study earns 14 stories. Nine include a hyperlink to the methods page. Two of those nine are on the same publisher group (a national site and its local vertical). Unique referring domains = 8. One link uses the anchor “click here,” six use the study title, two use the brand name. Six months later two publishers redesign and drop the href. The live earned-link inventory is 7 links / 6 domains, not “14 hits.”

Google’s spam policies target scaled, paid, and deceptive link schemes. An editor linking because the table was useful sits on the safe side of that line. A marketplace that sells “digital PR packages” of 20 guest posts does not.

How it differs

An unlinked mention is the same story without the href. Link reclamation is the email that asks for the href. Domain authority and domain rating are vendor scores built partly from link graphs; they are not Google’s score. Referral traffic is people clicking the link. You can earn a high-authority backlink that nobody clicks and still want it for retrieval.

Common errors

Celebrating a nofollow logo farm. Asking every reporter for a “dofollow.” Using exact-match commercial anchors in a pitch (“best cheap wire transfer app”) and training editors to smell a scheme. Reporting link count the week a campaign ships and never recrawling. Treating a LinkedIn post URL as a backlink that moves Google.

Sources